Archive for 'January, 2008'

Entrecard has released some new features in it’s dashboard today and retooled the design a bit. Dropped cards are now listed from left to right in the top in a smaller size, and when you mouse over them they “expand” like this:

News feeds are new in the dashboard too, they look like this:

And behind door #3 is the new “drop rank” feature which looks like this…

Personally, I’m waiting for features with a little more meat (I think these are kind of fluff), but we’ll see what everyone else thinks the next few days. Check out the Entrecard Blog post about the new features here! What do you think about these new feaures?? Comment now!

Looking at ford.digitalsnippets.com you might just see another press release web site. But for the source code curious, under the hood you see the HTML code revealing that the site runs on open source WordPress blogging software and uses a custom SMPR or Social Media Press Release theme developed by the Social Media Group.

Maggie Fox and the Social Media Group have done a great job by being able to communicate to a Fortune 100 company what social media can mean to them, and you can even view their third revision of a Social Media Press Release (SMPR) layout. Digital Snippets may not look like WordPress at first glance, when when you view the source code it’s pretty obvious:

<link rel="wlwmanifest" type="application/wlwmanifest+xml" href="http://ford.digitalsnippets.com/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml" />
<img src="http://ford.digitalsnippets.com/wp-content/themes/SMPR/images-main/single-header.jpg" alt="Ford Motor Company - digital snippets" />
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.3.2" />

Take a look at one of the product pages such as this one for the Ford focus. You see Flickr images linked in the top banner, and in the “quick links” section under the header you see words that lead you to believe this is actually a blog, like “conversation”, “community”, “tags”, and “share”. Sadly when you click on these that’s not what you find at all. Conversation is just a half dozen links to other auto web sites with stories about Ford products. Community is just the footer with a blogroll of “other interest” automotive links. Tags leads to “Suggested Tags” which are keyword the products and product pages are tagged with. Last, Share is your usual menangerie of social bookmark links begging you to save a bookmark somewhere (anywhere!) to one of the pages. The only thing that really impressed was the fact that they had a block of YouTube videos on the page.

The thing that disturbs me is that WordPress (a blogging platform) was used to set this up, and admittedly you can structure and manage a static web site using WordPress. But the functions and features it natively provides, like interactivity (comments and subscribers), blogging (posts and archives), and third party plugins (offering a plethora of options) have all sadly been lost on this implementation. The Social Media Group was obviously hired by Marketing and Sales management at Ford who had been reading the latest trade journals touting the social power of the Internet. Not to belittle what SMG (Social Media Group) has done, this was idealistically a good move for a behemoth Fortune 100 company. But other than the fact that Digital Snippets links to (and uses some of the) images and video uploaded to YouTube and Flickr using a Ford Motor Company account, AND the fact that you can subscribe to (press release) RSS feeds throughout the site – what other uses of the social media does the site actually use??

It’s funny, because the things that Digital Snippets lacks are actually available if you follow the links on the videos and pictures to Flickr and YouTube. At those two sites you can create an account, and comment on the assets themselves. But none of that information is carried back to digital snippets (and it easily could be using their API’s). It also seems like a cautious move on Ford’s part, we’ll foray into the world of social media a bit by allowing social bookmarks and displaying some links to YouTube and Flickr. But we don’t want any interativity “here” (because we’d have to police that and pay attention to it).

That brings me to my next point of who this site is actually supposed to be for. Who is the audience – the press and media or consumers (or both)?? The links at the top of every page are Ford.com (for consumers) and media.ford.com (for the media). The contact information (like that on the Ford Focus page) is clearly for the media. The name, the layout, and contact information clearly seem to present this as a site for the press – but the assets that have been placed in YouTube and Flickr – aren’t they for consumers? My point here is, it would seem that at some point (some volume of) consumers should arrive at this (public) site. Shouldn’t there be some kind of message addressing that (consumers here, media here, etc.). Maybe I should refine my point further – this entire web site is billed as a “social media press release”. Isn’t that term an oxymoron? Who are the social media? The people using reddit, digg, google blog search, technorati, techcrunch, YouTube, mySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter are CONSUMERS – not MEDIA. And a press release is for the media – typically to announce something (that they can report on). So – what does this make an SMPR?? Information released to the social media for public consumption but styled like a press release? Does this make sense?

Getting back to WordPress, any good blogger, web designer, or seo can tell you about the default out of the box seo qualities (in addition to spam protection) WP possesses. But what happens when a “social media” or advertising company uses something like WordPress, can these qualities be lost? Maybe, if you don’t have a good blogger or online marketer on staff.

Take a look at this code from the Ford Focus page:

    <title>  THE 2008 FORD FOCUS - Ford Motor Company - digital snippets</title>


    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
    <meta name="description" content="" />
    <meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.3.2" />

Other than the product and company name does that title describe at all what is on the page? 2008 Ford Focus WHAT? Pictures? Reviews? Can I buy one? Media slick, press release, news – what is it? If I worked on the main Ford.com web site I’d be pissed there was another (Ford site) with a title like that (so similar to what the official Ford.com product page would have). At least if you visit the official 2008 Ford Focus page the html title says “Ford Vehicles: 2008 Ford Focus – See pricing, photos, options, packages, and more“.

Now take a look at the code above for the description. It’s blank. What do you think that will show as a result in google? I’ll show you:

Look at the description under the title link – it’s the quick links text from the page (because it’s the first thing the search crawler read when indexing the page). WordPress could have helped create not only better SEO title tags, but better meta descriptions a hundred different ways. How much do title tags and descriptions matter in search nowadays? Quite a bit! You can find 284 indexed pages in google for Ford’s Digital Snippets today, but if you look at how many are actually available to come up in search results it’s only two. Yes, two! Why? Because 119 results were sent to google’s “supplemental index hell” because of duplicate content (from the bad meta descriptions). Maybe the Social Media Group should hire someone with seo and online marketing skills to assist in situations like this. The Sales and Marketing execs at Ford will never know anything beyond the pretty google analytics stats they’re fed, but so much more could be done with this web site.

While I applaud Ford Motor Company for what they probably thought was “exploding into online social media” – I encourage them (the Sales and Marketing Execs who purchased this from the Social Media Group) in the future to purchase an unbiased review and some consulting time from one or more of the reputable consulting (and online trend predicting) companies. You can’t always completely buy in to what they trade rags say is the buzzword of the day.

And WordPress? Well, we will watch for the next big Fortune 100 company to use your open source goodness, and we hope next time you are exploited to your full potential!

If you want to make a living online you have to start building a monthly income. In 2007 I averaged $1,345 per month for the year, this is just over $16,000. This is not enough to quit my day job, but it is proof I am building wealth and sustainable income online and making progress towards my goals. Why would I disclose this information? Because I think it makes it more real for you. You wouldn’t be reading this blog unless you were trying to become a better blogger and earn more money online. I want you to know that you can do it, and that it won’t happen overnight. I also want you to see that progress takes time, and I’m only part of the way through my journey of becoming successful by blogging.

First, check out the 1099 statement I got from google in the mail yesterday. You can click the image for a larger version.

This is what I earned in 2007 from adsense for my web sites. The average is about $850 per month, and I didn’t realize that I made that much from adsense last year until I got this google 1099 tax statement in the mail. I got to thinking about this because Alan at Affiliate Confession wrote a few days ago on his blog that he earned over $12,000 from google adsense in 2007, and I thought that was pretty incredible. Then when I got my statement I thought – you know I’m becoming successful too! The difference is Alan is building a sustainable income that is growing over time, and my adsense revenue was quite sporadic. I had one month that was almost $4,000, some under $1,000, a few a couple hundred, etc. In fact, for this first month of 2008 (the first month in over a year) I may just fall a few dollars short of the $100 required to get a payment next month! I’ll have to write about that in another post…

So I made the other $5,000 in 2007 from affiliate programs like Amazon, Commission Junction, Clickbank, and CCBill. I have yet to make a dime from Clickbank, but I’m sure I’ll get something from them in 2008! I also used some contextual link companies to make money online as well, like Targetpoint (for a time), and Kontera. I also made some money with one particular site by using AdBrite.

I intend on writing much more about what I’m earning online in 2008 because I want you to see my progress, both where I fail and where I succeed. I’m very happy to see Turnip of Power blog about his first affiliate check for $141.15. I wish I would have blogged more last year about what I was making online – as I was making it. Signup for my rss feed or subscribe by email in the top right of any page on this blog if you are interested in following my success in 2008. I have some very interesting series that you will want to read for exact instructions with actionable items if you want to earn more money online this year and begin building a monthly income! If you are reading this post and you are a blogging trying to earn more money online – I CHALLENGE YOU TO BLOG ABOUT WHAT YOU MADE IN 2007 NOW!!

In turn, I will update this post and add you to…

The blogroll of people who disclosed their online earnings in 2007

Google Adsense over $12,000 in 2007
My First Affiliate Check
My First Check from Neverblue Ads
Tom’s a licensed real estate agent who blogs about his online income in 2007
Alan reports Affiliate and Internet income over $25,000 for 2007
Xavier Media writes about earnings in December 2007
Link Bait Me says His Check is Bigger Than Yours
Study of Blog Earnings 2008
Mixed Market Arts January 2008 Earnings

You have a free tool at your fingertips to track stats for your blog that you could never afford to buy. Google Analytics is an enterprise class application, meaning it would cost Fortune 100 companies tens of thousands of dollars to license if it were for sale. But it’s free for anyone to use, and just because Re/Max, Discount Tire, CK Restaurants (Carl’s Jr, Hardee’s) are using it doesn’t mean that the smallest personal blog can’t use it too!This is the first article a new series to help you work through your blogging mistakes called Tracking Your Blog’s Progress. Please subscribe via rss or email at the top right of any page so you don’t miss any of the future installments!

As I’m writing this today is Sunday. Sunday is a lazy day, and this is rare because I usually don’t write anything on Sundays. That’s cause I’m out late a lot of nights with my band, and Sunday afternoon is a good time to relax from the stresses of the week. Yesterday was especially hectic because my 16 year old daughter accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake when maneuvering out of the garage with the car. What happenned? She smashed into the door jamb ripping the mirror off the car and smashing the quarter panel, and also ripped part of the garage wall out and completely off the foundation. Now there’s a stressful day!

So if you need to relax too, here are 5 great ways to check your blogging progress using google analytics on a regular basis.

Check your Google Analytics Stats

If you’re not already using google analytics – you should be! If you need to add it to your blog – just visit my WordPress plugins used page and find the google analytics plugin I use so you can enable it in your blog. Everyone that checks their stats want to see more visitors and pageviews, but there are other things you should be looking for.

5 Key things to check in Google Analytics for blog progress:

1. Average pageviews: What’s the average number of pages a visitor sees before leaving your site? Over time this number should increase if you have quality content because you gain subscribers and repeat visitors. Also, people should be finding related content to read. If this number doesn’t increase over time you should either re-think the quality of your content or your blog layout. Are you showing related items, featuring posts, and providing breadcrumbs? What’s a good number? I feel under 2 needs improvement, 2-4 is acceptable, and 5+ is exceptional!
2. Time on site: The number of pageviews is of course tied to how much time they spend on your site. If they view an average of 2.5 pages and the average time is 35 seconds you have a problem. It means they are click, clicking away to find what they want – and not getting it. Every blog is different, but my general rule of thumb is that the time on site should be at least 60 seconds for every average pageview. Time on site should increase with average pageviews and as your blogging progress increases!
3. Bounce rate: The bounce rate is the amount of visitors that viewed a single page and left your site (which is an indicator your visitors didn’t find what they were looking for). You will always have a bounce rate, but the higher it is the poorer you are at retaining visitors. I think 90% and up is pretty bad, 60-90% is to be expected once you get 25+ quality posts, 40-60% is excellent, and under 40% is amazing! If you click on the bounce rate link on your analtics dashboard home, you get a breakdown page with the bounce rate by day. This is very interesting because you can see your bounce rate vary wildly throughout the week. With this information you can actually begin to figure out what people want to read more of on your blog. For instance, if your bounce rates are typically 70-80% but you had one day of 40% and one day of 50% figure out either what you posted on that day – or what people read that day. If it was say for instance about wordpress seo, those visitors probably found related posts about either wordpress or seo that caused them to view more than one page. Write more in these areas! Also pay attention to the days (and posts) with high bounce rates. Do you need more content in these areas – or was the bounce rate high because you were posting off-topic or in an area not highly enough targeted to your blog’s niche?
4. New visits: This is the percentage of people visiting your blog for the first time. Over time, if you’re making progress this number better be going down, because if you’re doing a good job you should be consistently increasing repeat visitors through rss subscriptions and bookmarks. If it isn’t think about re-tooling your blog layout to encourage bookmarks (both social and regular), and subscriptions via rss and email
5. Traffic Sources: It’s important to know where you traffic is coming from because all blogs start out with mostly search engine traffic. Over time if you are making progress the percentage of referring sites should growing and growing. It’s an indicator of blogging progress because quality content and posts will naturally draw links from referring sites. In addition, if you are spending time networking with bloggers in Entrecard, blogCatalog, myBlogLog, StumbleUpon, etc., your referring traffic will grown and grow. If you click to view the report for Top Traffic Sources you can drill down and get more key data, like what search engines you ARE getting traffic from and which ones you ARE NOT. Watch your keywords and continue to use the ones that are bring the highest number of visits now, and make plans to work on the lower ranked ones or keywords that want to start getting traffic from. Where your traffic is coming from and how it changes over time is a key indicator of your blogging progress.

Google Analytics Tricks

• First – common questions and help can be found in the Google Analytics Help Center.
• Schedule email reports daily, weekly, or monthly: At the top of every google analytics report is an “email” button. Click it to schedule emails weekly, daily, or monthly for reports you want to see. You can combine as many different reports as you want into one email, and choose to get a PDF file, or other formats like csv or xml for use in Excel or other reporting applications.
• 7 Advanced Google Analytics Tricks can be found on the Da Vinci Planet blog. These are very helpful advanced tricks like how to track downloads, flash, outbound links, affiliate links, adsense clicks, how to use link tracking, and how to identify additional search engines.
• Be sure to read Sticky Design Tricks to Keep Your Visitors from Bouncing
• To keep detailed track of your 404 errors, read this article on how to Create Custom Google Analytics Code to Place on 404 Error Pages. They even have a special section on a custom WordPress 404.php error page with specific googlebot and robots meta tags!
• If you find that you’re getting a lot traffic from Google Images, then you really need to read how to Track Google Images Search in Google Analytics.

Quality Google Analytics Resources

**Disclosure – These links to Amazon books are affiliate links. If you are interested in purchasing one as a google analytics reference or training guide, I would encourage you to buy it by clicking from this page. The small commission received from selling a book helps me to write more free articles and quality content for you!

The books displayed here represent the highest reviewed Google Analytics books on the market today:

Google Analytics 2.0

Web Analytics: An Hour a Day

Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smart Business Decisions

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning

Do you have a question, or item to share that would make this article even better? Please, by all means – comment now!

Do you use WordPress Plugins? Where did you find the best ones? Probably from blogs that were using them! The best plugins I’ve found were being used on blogs I read. Sometimes it was easy to figure out what they were called and where to get them, and other times I had to wade through html code and comments to figure it out.

I’ve written about a lot of WordPress plugins, like the Automattic Stats plugin I use, or cForms for a WordPress Contact Form. I’ve written about plugins that make money through eBay and WordPress plugins that display ads – even ones that clean up formatting – like the plugin that escapes code in posts. But I don’t think I’ve ever written a post with every single WordPress plugin I use. That would be hard to keep updated anyway.

Rather than keep a list of the top 10 best WordPress plugins, the WordPress plugins that save the most time, or the most used WordPress plugins – I figure it would be easier to just show you a list of the WordPress plugin I enabled and running right now and use every day! How do I do this? You may find this funny – but I use a plugin to display my WP plugins, I use Lester Chan’s Display Plugins Used. I can’t say enough about Lester’s plugins – they all have worked flawlessly for me! ‘Display Plugins Used’ is a prime example, it shows all active (and inactive if you choose) plugins you have installed. Now I never have to keep an up to date list or constantly keep updating a post about my plugins – you can find them on my ‘Wordpress plugins used’ page here!

This doesn’t mean I won’t write, review, or explain plugins in posts again – it just means if you ever wonder how I’m doing something on this blog first view my WordPress plugins used page, and if that doesn’t answer your curiosity – just use my contact form to ask me!

Question or comment about my plugins? Want to talk about what plugins you use? Comment now!

*Update 01-25-2007* This has become quite the monumental post. I love posts that incite some debate – and make no bones about revisions to correct content, or even change my opinion based on new information. This post is no exception – sorry about having to make it look like the 5th draft of a term paper – but it seems to be “evolving” a bit more every day. If you have something to add – just post or reply to a comment below!

*Update 01-24-2007*When I blogged about this earlier today I sent a message through Entrecard to all the top 5 “Make Money Online” blogs on Entrecard telling them I wrote about them, inviting them to comment, and also to “continue the meme” with a post on their site. I sent one to John Chow, because he was in the top 5, and he wrote about it – AND he dropped his card on me. That was nice of him. John – as I stated in message to you, a link back to my article would have been nice…=) I understand why you didn’t link back to me, because you probably get requests like that all the time, but it would have been nice nonetheless!

Entrecard is the new “it” widget for blogs. If you’re new – is it worth your time to get involved in the Entrecard community – or is your time wasted? What do you “really” have to do to benefit? Are the contests and credits worth it? Is Entrecard a black hole time sucker with a fake economy? This is my review of Entrecard and the experiences I’ve had with it on my blog the last few months. Hopefully I’ll not only give you some things to think about, but after reading this you’ll want to comment and post your experiences as well.

There are tons and tons and tons of posts on Entrecard all over the Web detailing good and bad experiences (*see the links at the end of this post). Entrecard is the new blog golden child, and it’s spread like wildfire from the “A-list bloggers” on down. I’ve been using Entrecard since I heard about it on Shoemoney.com. He saw it at a tradeshow and had good things to say about it. Shoe also saw MC Hammer promoting a dance site – so take that with a grain of salt. Shoemoney wasn’t the only one trying Entrecard, soon John Chow and Problogger were too – and all bets were off. Everyone started adding it (kind of like the Blogrush phenom).

What is Entrecard?

The concept of Entrecard is simple. You create a 125×125 “card” – like your ‘business card on the web’. Really, it’s just an ad. And the 125×125 ads have kind of become the default blogging ad. You place the “widget” on your site and other Entrecard members can do two things. First they can click “drop card” and second they can advertise on your site (on that widget). Everytime someone “drops a card” you get 1 credit. When you drop a card on someone else’s site (with the widget) you get 1 credit.

*update*
Here’s a graphic from the Entrecard site about credits:

Your “level of activity” in the Entrecard community determines the current “ad rate”.

*update*
How much does it cost to advertise on someone’s widget?

From the Help Guide on the Entrecard site

To advertise your card on someone else’s widget, it costs the number of credits equal to twice the number of cards dropped on that widget each day. So if a widget receives an average of 50 cards dropped into it each day, advertising on that widget will cost 100 credits per day. This helps insure that for every two credits you pay, a unique user will see your ad and be clicking in the general vicinity. It also ensures the economy balances, because every time you drop your card, it creates two credits. That surplus mus be balanced via advertising costs.

When you start Entrecard your ad rate is just a few measly credits. Then (since you are new and your ad cost is very low) you will get a slew of sites wanting to advertise on your widget before your cost goes up. *update* There is however a balance to this, since you are new you ad rate is low, and everyone will want to advert with you at the low rate, which will cause many to drop cards and ask for ads, not only generating credits for you but driving your ad price up (from all the dropped cards). This should get you off to a good start as long as you keep networking within the Entrecard community.

Basically, a new Entrecard signup is listed in the “Most Recent” listings tab in “Campaign” – so those of us that have been on Entrecard awhile know where to look for fresh meat. All activity makes your ad rate go up. *update* See the previous paragraph regarding what determines your ad rate. People dropping their card on you, you dropping your card, approving and rejecting adverts for your site, leaving people recommendations and messages, responding to messages – these are all things that make your ad rate go up. *update*> All the activities within Entrecard, like leaving recommendations, messaging, approving and rejecting adverts – will cause people to drop their card on you making your ad rate go up. In other words – you determine your own “popularity” through your participation in the EC network. When you do things you earn credits, and you can use them to buy ads on other sites. It may not have the greatest algorithm (yet), but Entrecard was smart to tie your ad rate to your involvement in the community. (see last sentence). It forces you to be somewhat involved. Who would want to be on the bottom of a category and have your ad rate be single digit numbers?

Inflated Entrecard Stats?

The flip side of this is that there are some people who have nothing but time on their hands – and they “click, click, click” all day long dropping their card on everyone in sight making their ad rate unbelievably high *update* you can’t “click” your ad rate higher. But the more you increase your visibility (by dropping your card) the more your ad rate will go up because more people will drop their card on you. Thanks to Colin King (see comments below) for pointing this out to me again. I guess the limit of sites you can drop your card at is 300 in a day, and I’ve read about several that have reached that limit. But why, can you imagine dropping a card 300 times? That’s finding 300 sites on Entrecard, visiting 300 profiles, then clicking to 300 homepages, and dropping your card 300 times. That just seems insane to me. *update*:Just because it seems insane to be, doesn’t mean that others don’t see the benefit (read comments below). This post says “worth it or worthless” in the title because you determine what you get out Entrecard and what it’s worth to you.

I want you to take a look at the top spots in the “Make Money Online” category today. For a long time John Chow was #1, and now he’s #5. And #3 is Problogger. But if you are new to Entrecard you might be asking yourself – who in the heck are numbers 1, 2 and 4?? This is both the neat thing “and the flaw” of Entrecard (right now). A virtually unknown blogger can “click his way to the top“, and that part of the algorithm should probably be changed. Maybe limit the amount of sites you can drop a card on per day to something reasonable – like 50. But you can also have a very high ad price if you have a high level of activity on your account – from lots of card drops (from other sites), to lots of messages and recommendations (and you responding to them as well). So, if you’re having a contest or send out lots of messages – you can significantly boost your ad price.

*update*I want to revise the previous paragraph because it (again) says you can click you way to a high ad rate position, which (in comments and previously in this post) I pointed out already you can’t. You can drop your card 300 times a day to “increase your popularity and visibility” – and that will get droves of people to drop their card on you. Your ad rate is the number of card drops times 2, so to get an ad price of say 360, you just need 180 card drops per day. Now that I realize this it’s more impressive what the “unknown” bloggers have done (and ‘up-and-coming’ is probably a better word than ‘unknown’). Think about this – John Chow and Problogger have massive traffic, so (ask Colin King again points out below in comments) they probably get an unusually high rate of card drops from people hoping to get their attention. Colin, Teri, and Kumo have all become visible enough (in Entrecard’s community) to rank as high as the heaviest hitting bloggers around – all from their own efforts (not guaranteed daily traffic)! My final statement from that paragraph still stands:

“In other words, you are rewarded for your “participation in the community” of Entrecard.” Because participation = visibility, and visibility = popularity, and popularity = EC credits and higher ad price. Hopefully this all translates to more rss subscribers, more comments on your posts, and more visitor’s and readers to your blog.

Is Entrecard Worth Your Time

Tossing aside the ability of “clicking your way to the top” for the moment, Let’s look at the benefits of that participation. Going back to the top 5 spots in the “Make Money Online” category on Entrecard let’s talk about the (outside of Entrecard) unknown ‘up-and-coming’ bloggers in positions #1, #2, and #4. *Update* – I just want to stipulate that I’m using these 3 sites as an example only – they are currently ranked in the top 5 ad price spots for “make money online” in Entrecard, against arguably the top 2 “A-list” bloggers in the world. Those spots seem to change weekly, sometimes daily depending on amounts of activity the amount of card drops.

These would be:

#1 spot – A Geek’s Journey by Colin King
#2 spot – Toast Egg & Me by Kumo
#4 spot – Internet Dreamer by Toni Turner

The reason that I call all three of these sites “unknown bloggers up-and coming bloggers” is because they aren’t even listed in the Top 100 Sites about Making Money Online. **Disclaimer – Colin King points out in comments below that you have to ask to be on that list or carry their “widget”, something I didn’t know. Actually, that list goes a bit beyond the top 100, it goes up to #281, and Internet Dreamer is listed as #170, but the other two aren’t listed at all. The top money making sites list is scored by a combination of google pagerank, technorati score, and alexa ranking. So it’s a combination of google trust, blogosphere reputation, and amount of traffic – a pretty good unbiased combination if you ask me. I’ve worked very hard on this site – and I don’t even rank in the top 281 yet!

So the point of contention here is the ad price or amount of EC’s (entrecard credits) you need to spend to place an ad with one of these 3 sites. Colin King at #1 has an ad price of 378 credits for one day. Toast, Egg & Me at #2 is 334, and Toni Turner is 301 credits per day. Can you really justify spending that many credits on one of those sites? *update*: Again – I’d like to point out that my point here is to get you to decide if your perceived value of Entrecard makes it worth it, or not? If you buy in to my previous comments about what you get out of your EC participation you will agree with ad pricing, and if you don’t agree you won’t. Leave your comment at the end of this post…

Let’s talk about #4 – Internet Dreamer a second. Toni Turner’s site has only been live for 2 months and 25 days (as of today). She only has 115 RSS subscribers, a google pagerank of 2, 1,838 pages that link to her, and 88,136 Alexa ranking (it terms the site as “low traffic”). The value of a single text link is $15. Total estimated site value $940.

Now #2 – Toast Egg & Me. Kumo has been online 3 months and 20 days. There is no google pagerank yet, with 1,055 links. Alexa ranking is 146,702 (they say ‘just getting started’), and a text link is worth $10. Total estimated site value is only $640.

Last #1 – which is Colin King. He’s #1 in Making Money Online today (on Entrecard), and has been online 9 months, 25 days correction: Colin’s site has been online 3 months and 3 days with a google PR of 0 no pagerank yet – and 10,789 links (according to dnScoop) (how do you have that many backlinks with a zero PR unless you have a penalty Colin states in comments below I made an assumption of his site being penalized by google. With that many links (dnScoop lists 10,789, google says 199) and no pagerank – and there was a very recent pagerank update, you can usually smell penalty. Sure enough, if you google site:www.ageeksjourney.com you get no results, and even googling the domain gets only 2 pages. That IMHO is a big-time google penalty. *update*: He has links for http://ageeksjourney, maybe that’s the issue??), an Alexa ranking of 100,784. A text link is valued at only $10 – but this does have a supposed value of $8,549.

*Update*
I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I think these 3 blogs are either worthless or that no one visits them. I’m merely painting a picture for you, and to illustrate that point I’m going to include the other two blogger like I should have the first time around. The entire point I’m making here is – Look at these 3 ‘up-and-coming’ bloggers – they are actually competing head to head (in Entrecard) with 2 of the most well known juggernauts of the blogosphere!

#3 – Problogger (Darren Rowse), has a pagerank of 6, 829,841 links, Alexa rating of 3,040, text link value of $491, and a total estimated site value of $8,753,920.

#5 – John Chow, has a pagerank of 4, 286,052 links, Alexa rating of 3,572, text link value of $491, and a total estimated site value of $343,140.

Looking at those stats alone I would immediantly say there’s no way I could justify spending that many credits for an ad on any one of these three blogs (if you were wondering where I got all these figures – I just did a quick lookup on dnScoop.com for some quick stats – and aguably take these with a grain of salt). But you have to also think about the Entrecard community and what it’s intrinsic value is to you. The exposure you get within the Entrecard community alone may be well worth that spending that many entrecard credits. Toni Turner drops 300 cards per day every day – for sure. I get one in my box almost every day. But because of her persistence in my Entrecard Inbox – I know her name now, her site’s name, and I’ll not soon forget it. She’s build her own little brand within the Entrecard community. And because of all the card drops, people drop cards on her. People pay the high EC rate to advertise on her site because they figure with all activity people are going to see their advert quite a bit. So maybe it is worth saving up some credits. What little ‘A large percentage of’ traffic some of these sites are getting (like mine) is coming from Entrecard itself. Is that a bad thing? I guess it depends on your niche. I certainly wouldn’t spend enough time to drop 300 card per day myself. *Update*: However, you can see from the comments below that those dropping 300 cards a day say it can take less than an hour per day – and it’s well worth it to them!.

I blog about making money, and learning from blogging mistakes, and most of my posts are about blog tips, blog help, earning more money online, or WordPress hacks and what-not. If I get 30-40 visits a day from Entrecard card droppers I consider that valuable, and quite a few of those visitors have signed up for my RSS feed and commented on my posts. I have found at least a dozen new blogs through Entrecard, and even formed a new blogging network “Content Exchange” through my Entrecard contacts. I have greatly benefited from my Entrecard network of new-found blogging friends. Would a blog about “dog training” be able to the same? Why not – there are currently 23 other blogs in the “Pets” category on Entrecard they could network with.

The Bottom Line of Entrecard

I say that if you’re going to bother to sign up with Entrecard, you should at least become involved in the community enough to benefit. With just minimal effort (like 10-15 minutes or less per day) you can have an ad price of 20-40 entrecard credits. *update*: (you’ll have that ad price because when you raise your visibility from participation more people will drop their card on you, hence raise your ad price 2 credits for every card drop you receive). Why? Why not – you are also going to be “building a brand” by dropping your card on a half-dozen new sites per day. Place ads on other sites, and accepts ads on yours. You will not only raise your ad price – but also find great articles on others sites to help you make more money on your blog. After a few weeks, drop messages to the sites you like best – do a few “recommendations”. Participate in a few contests, maybe put on a contest of your own. You aren’t just becoming part of the Entrecard community – you are starting to build up your own little community around your blog. A good blog with dedicated readers isn’t just about good content. You also need to network, talk to people, help people, do some marketing, build some links – participate, collaborate, and communicate!! I have tried to advertise twice with my friend Marco Richter, and he hasn’t approved or rejected my ads – I don’t think he’s participating much right now with Entrecard. But he doesn’t seem to have posted at all in the last month (I hope he’s ok), and he’s still #101 on that top 100 making money online list of blogs!

Pay attention to your stats! After you advertise with some sites, click on the “more stats” link in the bottom right of the quick stats in your dashboard. At the very bottom of the page, pay attention to the “Widgets Shown on” section, because these are stats where you have paid to advertise. You get top 10 stats for “clicks”, meaning the sites you advertised on that got the most clicks back to you. The #1 site I advertised on got 33 clicks – I should probably advertise on them again. If all your sites are <10 clicks or very low, maybe you should rethink the types of sites you are advertising on – are they even in your niche?

Oh, and one last thing. The reason I included my EC dashboard stats from today was to also show you, your ad price can go way up and down. I had an ad price of 80 credits a week ago because I messaged a hundred or so blogs about my new Content Exchange. I’ve been soooooo busy since then I haven’t dropped more than a handful of cards in a week, but people dropping on me kept the rate high for 6 days. Now that’s starting to drop of so my price is back to normal. I stay active in Entrecard, but not to the point where I don’t get anything else done on my blogs and web sites. You can see that I only drop about 1/2 the amount of cards that are dropped on me. And I haven’t bought a lot of ads (or had a lot purchased) from me recently either. And yet my ad price is pretty good because of my participation. Did I mention that most of the people I get cards from also seem to belong to blogCatalog and myBlogLog too? Building a little “community of bloggers” within your site can go a long way!

I’m going to message a few of the blogs I like best on Entrecard and ask them to comment on this post with their EC experiences as well!! I wonder if others feel the same way about Entrecard that I do? What do you think? Comment now!

**FINAL UPDATE**:
My goal with this post was show you the perceived value of Entrecard can be what you yourself make of it. Much like a blog itself, you get out of EC what you put into it. So now that you’ve read my post, going back to my title – I ask you, in your experience – has Entrecard been “worth it” or “worthless” to you, and why do you think that is? Have you participated enough? Do you think it’s worth it? Have you been getting traffic from it, new comments and rss subs? Have you networked with and met new bloggers?

Other posts around the web about Entrecard:

Entrecard Sucks: post outlining the reasons they think EC sucks, but in the end the post is summarized with reasons that EC networking is good and they’re going to keep it for now.

Entrecard Sucks?: a linkbait title, but post about how EC can bring bursts of traffic. I don’t think he realizes that if he participated more, he’d have new (and sustainable) traffic.

Sir Jorge says Entrecard Sucks because his blog about videos has nothing to do with “making money online”. I don’t think he gets the fact that you can use Entrecard in any niche.

Dot Sauce says ‘Entrecard blog network delivers traffic’ blogs about being happy with the networking and traffic EC has provided.

Raymond blogs about his ‘Month Long Orgy with Entrecard’, and says it took him over 6 hours to drop 300 cards. He says EC has been a tremendous benefit to him.

Reward Rebel writes ‘Entrecard Rides Again’ and wonders why the stats aren’t more detailed, or we at least can’t get access to the raw data that’s collected.

If you were looking to get more out of Entrecard – here’s a great post from Technet News Entrecard Tips for Success!

Sam Freedom’s Internet Marketing blog has all kinds of quality posts on Entrecard.
Let’s start with: 10 Simple ways to squeeze the most out of Entrecard, but it doesn’t stop there. Sam has a massive amount of quality Entrecard posts, help, tips, contests and more. He is prolific about blogging his Entrecard experiences, be sure to check him out.

I’m writing this article specifically for people hosted on godaddy that have had the following .htaccess, mod_rewrite or addhandler problems on shared or premium hosting accounts for various open source applications, such as (but not limited to) WordPress, Drupal, BBPress, Moodle, Geeklog, PHPNuke, Postnuke, and more!

Short list of potential issues:

• problems with permalinks in WordPress
• problems with clean URL’s in Drupal
• problems with pretty url’s in BBPress
• problems with WordPress MU
• ANY mod_rewrite problems in a sub-directory, subdomain, sub-folder, mapped domain, i.e., a domain you setup in goDaddy’s Domain Management -> Assign Domain to Hosting Site feature

I have struggled with two issues time and time again on a goDaddy shared or premium account. If I go into “Domain management -> Assign Domain” and “map” a domain to a folder of the root URL, I have problems with any site that needs to use an .htaccess file for “rewrite” the URL’s using a feature called “mod_rewrite” – especially WordPress and Drupal.

I came across a fix today that made all those problems go away forever. To be able to do what I’m about to tell you, you must also be hosting your domain name with goDaddy.

In your godaddy control panel, go to “Settings -> Domain Management”.

Click on “Add New Record“

In the very first line note the IP address of your “@” host, as you’ll by typing this into the box that comes up when you click to add a new record. In the first field type an asterik (*). In the second field type the IP address of your “@” host. Leave the drop down at one hour. Click “ok” to save.

That’s it – you’re done! There should be no fiddling with your .htaccess files at all.

Once I applied that simple fix – everything worked again.

I’ve also had problems when I’ve attempted to get .html or .htm files to parse PHP code as if they were .php files on goDaddy, or with applications that had to use PHP5. That fix is also really, really easy. All you have to do is create an .htaccess file with the following 2 lines:

AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php
AddHandler x-httpd-php .php .htm html

I’ve created a new free Blogging network called “Content Exchange! That’s right, and there’s no widgets, no “dropping cards”, no “poking”, no BS! Content Exchange is simply where you network with other bloggers to exchange content, or help, or code.

I had a blurb in my sidebar for 90 days asking for guest posters. I never got a single response. Now I realize that I was just sitting here waiting for people to find me. Through Content Exchange – you find other bloggers and request to exchange content with them! You write a post for their site, and they write one for yours. You could even request a specific topic, or even co-author a post with them. The possibilities are endless, but this is so much better than an Article Directory where you have no idea what kind of site (or how many sites) your post could end up on. You specifically choose a site to exchange with and you exchange original content to be posted only one time. You can write about a topic they choose, and use a byline – or write about your site and link back. Be creative!

If you do this on a regular basis you can build up a network of blogging friends to exchange with all the time! The entire idea here is to network and connect with new bloggers and build some community (and quality content) with other up and coming bloggers. Be your own b5 media and Performancing! You probably can’t beat John Chow on your own just yet – but maybe by partnering with a half dozen other bloggers you have a better shot!

I either belong to or have belonged to most of the famed blogging communities, like blogCatalog, bumpzee, myBlogLog, entreCard and the like. Sometimes they waste more of your blogging time than they do good. At Content Exchange there are no requirements – other than your participation. If you like, you can place a badge on your blog like the one above advertising to your visitors your willingness to exchange content. You can signup and complete your profile in 5 minutes, and simply post in the forum “I want to exchange content” or reply to someone asking to exchange. It’s that simple! I think you’d be surprised how much you will benefit from this. This blog has been online 8 months now – and one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made is not networking more with other bloggers!

If you like this idea as much as I do – Signup for Content Exchange, tell your friends, digg and stumble this post, post about it and review it in your blog, and tell your blogging friends as well! I built Content Exchange to help bloggers and be run by bloggers – it will only be successful with your participation!

Question about Content Exchange or something to add? Please – comment now!

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a very long time and just got around to it today. See the adsense ad (image) I pasted to the left as an example? See the little up and down arrows? Have you seen any of those on any of your sites? I think it’s something that adsense is test marketing because I see them randomly about 10% of the time.

If you catch them on a site, check them out. If you click up or down, it just dynamically shows you new ads (without reloading the page). As publisher I kinda think that’s pretty cool, since if someone bothers to check out more than one series of ads they are more likely to find one they like (and click it) – therefore increasing my chances to make money. However, many people are “ad blind” anyway, so how much will this really help?

Your thoughts?

Are Text-Link-Ads dead? I think they are. Back in August 2007 I wrote about the google text link ad penalty. It was pretty controversial then. Now it’s pretty much accepted that paid text links are bad and will get you banned from google. So I was on 45n5 today and was catching up on posts I missed and saw this post Text Link Ads is Black Hat SEO. That kind of cracked me up and he’s right you know. Like he says in the post, Wikipedia says that ‘Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception.’.

You’re not convinced Text Link Ads (or TLA) is deceptive? Well sir, I will point you to their home page which STILL egotistically claims “Improve your traffic and search engine rankings. Only TLA can deliver an ad that does both.” How in the hell can they still claim that? After all the fallout from google, their own web site doesn’t even rank for the phrase “text-link-ads” and that’s their brand – and they have a google pagerank of 7!!

You know what this reminds me of? Big tobacco.

Traditional “head-in-the-sand” marketing tactics:

“No, our products aren’t addictive. There’s no conclusive evidence. Cancer – what cancer? You can’t show me one verifiable case directly linked to our product(s).

Are they (TLA) stupid? I mean really stoooopid? Anyone savvy in business would have re-branded that company to adapt a new business model accomodating the new ways the Internet and it’s content is evolving. Change or die, ya know. Is it any surprise that the google search “I’m removing text link ads” yields more than 200,000 results? Out of the 20,000 publishers they still claim to have, I wonder how many have actively used their account in the last 6 months? It was no surprise that I found another post labeled Text-Link-Ads Blackhat in no time at all.

I remember back in October when google had the first smackdown on pagerank for text link ads and JohnTP talked about some high profile bloggers getting hit. It made me dig a little deeper and I came across this article by Jennifer Laycock written about the same time – which reminded me of the evolution and history of “nofollow” in the first place and it got me all red-eyed and Mel Gibson (conspiracy theory) like. Remember, nofollow was invented (by google) to combat “comment spam”. TLA was invented (essentially) to “buy pagerank”. TLA refuses to nofollow their ads, and kicks you out of the program if you add it to their ads on your blog.

First off – the battle for comment spam seems worse than even, look what Matt Mullenweg (inventor of WordPress) said:

In theory this should work perfectly, but in practice although all major blogging tools did this two years ago and comment and trackback spam is still 100 times worse now. In hindsight, I don’t think nofollow had much of an effect, though I’m still glad we tried it.

Secondly, as Jennifer points out nofollow has evolved into a way to kill illicit google juice by using a nofollow link condom! Jennifer say “Where does it end? Google doesn’t like paid text ads. Google doesn’t like paid graphic ads. Oh, Google doesn’t like sponsorship of blog themes either”? Now she’s wearing the Mel Gibson hat. Guess what. Matt Cutts AND Matt Mullenweg don’t like sponsored WordPress themes.

If all this isn’t making your head spin already – I go ahead and read Part 2 to the first Jennifer Laycock post, and as she points out – wtf is Yahoo! doing anyway? You can “pay” them for a “review” to be included in the Yahoo! directory – and if that’s not a “paid link” what is? Clearly if they nofollow’d that directory listing link nobody would ever want to buy one. But Yahoo! is big man on the block, much like the Wall Street Journal. Google would much rather piss off 100 bloggers with a pagerank slap than one of the largest companies or sites on the web.

I never liked TLA – I thought they were arrogant from the git-go. They should have adapted to a new model instead of acting like they were doing nothing and publicly ignoring paid text link concerns. But as Jennifer points out – where will it end? Will google hate banner links, affiliate links, all image links now? Will they begin to ban or penalize sites that use certain keywords in links? In Part 3 of that series Jennifer says that google (Matt Cutts) says that good anchor text (keywords in links) is “black hat SEO” (see article for context). WTF is that? Are we heading down a slippery slope? Will google kill us all in the end and give us a big manual telling us how to be naughty and how to be nice?

Comment now – I know you want to…..