netflix fee increase – marketing team was on drugs
C’mon – you really couldn’t do any better to spin this????
We are separating unlimited DVDs by mail and unlimited streaming into two separate plans to better reflect the costs of each. Now our members have a choice: a streaming only plan, a DVD only plan, or both.
Your current $9.99 a month membership for unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs will be split into 2 distinct plans:
Plan 1: Unlimited Streaming (no DVDs) for $7.99 a month
Plan 2: Unlimited DVDs, 1 out at-a-time (no streaming) for $7.99 a month
Your price for getting both of these plans will be $15.98 a month ($7.99 + $7.99). You don’t need to do anything to continue your memberships for both unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs.
These prices will start for charges on or after September 1, 2011.
You can easily change or cancel your unlimited streaming plan, unlimited DVD plan, or both, by going to the Plan Change page in Your Account.
We realize you have many choices for home entertainment, and we thank you for your business. As always, if you have questions, please feel free to call us at 1-888-357-1516.
–The Netflix Team
I don’t really understand blog spam but I kinda like it
Ok, so I get spam blog responses pretty darn frequently. I do not really understand it because for the most part, they SCREAM spam, so why am I going to approve their post? I suppose I might if they were not totally off topic or reading something to the effect of: “Wow, this article was exactly what I needed” and then they reference a link for viagra. Maybe if they actually provided some further value to the discussion, I dunno. Either way, they aren’t hard to remove or mark as spam, but they have got to be doing something for my page rank. I think I have posted once this year and I don’t think I have looked at my page since April. Nice to see I can find myself in a good place on page 1. The majority of the Spam seems to be in comment to my post about passing the Google Adwords exam. Go figure. So, thank you spammers for keeping me on page 1!
THis was a cool article about using facebook, twitter etc to build ranking.
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/12279/Links-Shared-on-Facebook-Lead-to-Higher-Search-Rankings.aspx
Sanibel Island is awesome!!
Well, I havent bothered to put anything up in awhile and jut checked in to clear out some spam comments. Amazing how many you get. Just got back in from staying at Mitchells Sandcastles for the weekend. I think maybe I’ll post a few pics soon. Wonderful place
well, haven’t gotten a thing done with the site……
I’ve really haven’t done anything with my online stuff lately. I was a bit pressed with taking two classes in the summer semester at UNA. I knew I would be, but I didnt expect to get hired and be working for someone else at the same time. Visage Mobile hired me to do some work on a consulting basis for them. Im having a great time and between that and school have let the rest slip. Now that school is out, time to start updating ……..
CCNA
Well I finally got around to studying and taking the test. I am once again Cisco CCNA certified. Test has changed so much since I originally certified years ago. Really need a much firmer hand on command knowledge due to the labs involved in the test. Now its time to get out and find a new network engineer position
SEO and Search marketing update
It’s been a while since I mentioned my progress on the Search front. And that basically means I havent taken any other actions since then. On Yahoo I am on page one. On Google, I am on page 1 when I look from my computer and my wife sees me at the top of page 2 when she looks. There are other Scott Paterson’s facebook pages ahead of me. Next challenge is to figure out what I can do to get past those, especially since I can’t even see mine in listings.
I just passed the Google Adwords Fundamentals Exam !!
Well, I got it done. I got an 88% on the Google Adwords Fundamental Exam. And here’s what I can tell you….
Prior to studying for the exam, my experience revolved around the Google Online Marketing Challenge. This is a student challenge that I got involved in due to my MBA Ecommerce course at UNA with Dr Crabtree. During the GOMCHA challenge, I read the Marketing and Advertising Using Google guide twice. I also went through most of the basic and advanced videos for Adwords that they have available.
For the exam, I downloaded and read all the Adwords Fundamentals Study materials which you can find here.
I did alot of highlighting while reading. Then I went through the Google Adwords Account we had used for the competition to refamiliarize myself with where everything was in the Adwords platform. The next day I took and passed the test, opened a cold beer and shared the results via email and facebook.
If I had it to do over again, I would have gone back and re-read Chapters 4, 13 and 15. I think a bulk of the material came from those sections.
I think some of the toughest questions for me were ones that focused on best practices or gave a customer example and then requested ‘best option’ for them. Ones that said where do you find or setup X, are pretty much ‘you know it or you don’t.’
Some items I can tell you about are:
Remember what tools are used for what, such as the keyword tool, Ad Preview, etc
There are a couple items each on mobile and video ads.
Make sure you remember what the most commonly used reports are good for what purpose (I think that’s in Ch 15)
lots of questions related to the info in Chapter 4 on Targeting and Placement.
Make sure you understand how CPC is calculated, how budget affects a campaign.
Know the various keyword options, such as exact match, negative keywords, etc
What does [keyword] do?
Hard to specifically mention much more. A 120 question allows them to pull from all over the subject material. I can only think of 1 or 2 questions that I just plain didnt remember actually being in the material, so if you know what’s in there well, you’ll do fine. If you don’t, study some more so you don’t waste 50 bucks.
When you take the exam, there is a little browser application that you have to download first and then you launch the exam from there. This prevents you from being able to access any other online resources on that computer while you are taking the test. One more reason to PRINT the study guide. On the other hand, if you don’t know the material, then the study guide isnt gonna help ya. One minute per question does not allow time for you to go hunting for answers if you don’t have a clue.
You will not receive an automatic email providing your exam passing status (at least I didnt). In the exam testing site, you can go under ‘Manage Your Test records’ and ‘create a test record’ that you can then ’share’ via email and pretty much through every other social networking application available. This is pretty cool because you can specify what information you want made available. If you want to just share the grade, good enough. If you want to share for some official reason, then you can add more your email address, etc. When you share via email it will forward a link that the receiver can then click on to view your information.
I hope this actually helps someone. When I Google’d for info, I really didnt find that much posted (at least in the first couple pages of results). Thanks for reading!
GoDaddy.com hosting and affiliate program
I just set up an affiliate link for the first time. I really didnt know what I was doing, but I’m going to show you what I did. First a word about our sponsor……
A few months back I bought the domain name of a failed business, www.suncoastsilks.com for $10 at an onsite auction. One of those WTF impulse buys. I figured maybe I’d try my hand at selling it later. Not long after I decided that someday I am going to want to put up my own blog. This site was hosted by GoDaddy and my www.scottpaterson.net was hosted elsewhere. After some price comparisons and general looking at competitors, I decided to move my domain and add a few more through GoDaddy.com. I’ve been very happy with my decision. Because I’m pretty green, I’ve called them several times during the course of signing up my domains and creating my blogs. Their customer service is awesome! And in reality, once you’ve gotten through something once, their platform seems to get alot easier to use. Btw, if you’re wondering why I’m using Godaddy.com rather than just using a free wordpress blog for my rants…..see that little picture link over to the right that says GoDaddy. If I had a free blog through wordpress, I couldnt put it up there. Using third party hosting I can do all the affiliate links I want.
Now back to the details of adding the affiliate link. At Godaddy I signed up for the affiliate program, and after reviewing, selected an add. I clicked the get code button and it spits out code that you add to your site where you want the add to be. GoDaddy says include it between <body> and </body>. Well, with the theme I’m using, I have columns on the right hand side as you see and I wanted think link to go over there.
I went under Appearance>editor. There I found a ‘r_sidebar.php’ file which says what is going in that column. I could barely tell what all the code in there means, but I could tell that ‘blogroll’ had under it the title ‘Links’ which corresponds to the links listing you see when you view my site. And nowhere could I see a <body>. So here’s what I did:
<!–r_sidebar.php–>
<div>
<ul>
<?php if ( function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) && dynamic_sidebar(2) ) : else : ?>
<!–recent posts–>
<li>
<h2>Archives</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_get_archives(‘type=monthly’); ?>
</ul>
</li>
I could tell that blogroll below seemed to indicate where the links started on the page. So under that I added <body> the snippet of code GoDaddy provided and then </body> which indicates the finish of body.
<!–Blogroll–>
<body> <iframe THIS IS IS THE CODE GoDaddy Provides /iframe> </body>
<li>
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
Above I posted the first portion of the PHP page and showed where I inserted the godaddy code for their add. It worked. The listing appeared right above links. Not sure if I needed the <bodY> statements or not, but if it aint broke…….
And that’s how I added my first affiliate link………..
SEO tweak for alerting to blog updates
I just updated my writing settings for both this site and www.boughtatauction.com to add a few new ping sites to alert the web to blog updates:
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
also updated my settings>writing> xml-rpc to allow me to use the new Wordpress app for my Droid phone to update the blog.