A discussion of earning with the Best Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers and Affiliate Marketers.

  If you haven’t been using EntreCard to promote your blog, you’re probably missing out on one of the best tools bloggers have to garner short bursts of traffic on a regular basis. Sure, there are detractors who will say EntreCard turns only traffic with a high bounce rate and most people visiting a site from EntreCard are only visiting sites to drop cards and earn credits. However, in my experience, regardless of how traffic is generated, whether it be from EntreCard, MyBlogLog, StumbleUpon or even organic SEO, there will always be a significant bounce rate and a lower percentage of visitors who remain on a site more than a few minutes.

That being said, my philosophy is “all traffic is good traffic” and for the most part, EntreCard does have a developing community of supporters who genuinely visit other community members’ sites and participate, not just bounce. If I can get one out of one hundred visitors from any traffic source to hang around long enough to read a few articles and leave a single comment or subscribe to my RSS feed, that’s a positive.

Now that I’ve given my reason for having the EntreCard widget on the sidebar of this blog, it’s time to get to discussing EntreCard’s “economy”, which is undergoing several critical changes that will impact the community. Here’s the latest update from EntreCard :

In order to continue operating in the long-term, Entrecard needs make some significant changes. These are summarized below: 1. Buy credits for less: Entrecard is now selling 1,000 credits for $6.00. You can buy them here: http://entrecard.com/r/buy_credits 2. More pricing increments: Instead of prices doubling every time, there are now a few more steps. The new price points can be found on the Advertising page in the wiki, here: http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=advertising 3. Members are not allowed to sell credits: This goes for ebay sales, posts in the Marketing forum, and posts on other forums. If you have references on your site to the sale of credits, please remove them immediately, as it is now against our terms. 4. Credit transfer limits: Members are allowed to make a maximum of 14 credit transfers a week, up to a maximum of 1,000 credits, whichever comes first. This means you can still run contests where you give credits away for free, and under 1k per week. Note: This does not affect linked blogs, you can transfer unlimited credits between linked blogs. 5. Transfer tax: From now on, all transfers, including transfers made with our new payments API, will be taxed at a rate of 12.5%. The taxed credits will be sold to members (see #1). 6. Blogs cannot be unlinked: Once you link a blog, it’s there for good unless you ask us to delete the blog from your account. This prevents linking/unlinking to get around the credit transfer limits, and it also stops you losing access to a blog if you unlink it in error, which happens a lot. 7. No more coupons: You are no longer allowed to send coupons. 8. Shop closed: Except for Entrecard upgrades (Featured Status, Fast Pass) the Entrecard Shop is now offline until further notice. Please do not request a seller token until the shop returns. When it comes back, it will be bigger and better. We’ll communicate more details nearer the time. We really do believe that an economy with plenty of 3rd parties involved is a stronger economy overall, unfortunately just right now we’re unable to support that given the need to keep everything running. We hope that, by taking the steps we have, we will be able to reach a good balance between maximizing the overall benefits for our users and getting the revenue we need to pay the bills and expand the service. Hopefully, in the future, we’ll be in a stronger position with a more diverse income and we’ll be able to reintroduce independent credit sales and unfettered credit transfers among members. We appreciate all the feedback we’ve had over the past few days on this topic, please let us know what you think by leaving a comment on our blog post here: Changes affecting the Entrecard economy Thanks for standing by us while we make these important changes, and know that these changes will allow us to continue to make available to you the great Entrecard service that brings you more traffic, comments, and subscribers and better rankings.

I’ll play devil’s advocate here and bring my economics background into factor to question exactly how EntreCard feels that their credit system is in fact an economy? If you have any experience in the field, you know that for an economy to exist, free enterprise must exist. In #3 above, cutting off the free enterprise system by disallowing members from selling EntreCard credits amongst themselves literally devalues EntreCard credits alltogether. Can you imagine if any government said that citizens were no longer allowed to sell gold or silver and that all gold would be sold by the government alone? Free enterprise sets a market value for a commodity and a governing body controlling all sales of a particular commodity is not an economy, it’s a totalitarian state.

Transfer tax ??? While I’ve never bought or sold credits, nor have I ever had the intention of doing so, this announcement seems more based on greed than anything else. Considering the lack of free enterprise, a tax on a valueless commodity is essentially a handling fee, not a tax. One thing I particularly dislkie is overinflating of credit based systems and for all it’s worth, if EntreCard is going to be the sole distributor of credits, they have essentially become just another traffic exchange like TS25, Traffic Pods or Trafficera (all of which are very good sources of traffic).

Once again, I’m not a member of the EntreCard community for reasons other than to network and generate traffic to my blogs so none of these changes impact nor bother me. I am merely offering my opinion on these changes in economic terms and reiterating that for any economy to thrive, free enterprise must be a factor. I’m not the only one who thinks so, Jeff at Buzz My Blog has weighed in with his article, EntreCard Changing the Rules - Too Little Too Late? and Jude8573 at Beauty Denominator has been put in a bind by the New EntreCard rules regarding 14 transfers per week.

Possibly these changes are due to EntreCard’s owner, Graham Langdon trying to sell the site at SitePoint within the last week but most likely it is due to Graham feeling the stress of operating a startup venture on a shoestring budget.

If you have an opinion on Entrecard’s recent changes, please feel free to leave a comment.

         

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As bloggers, most of us have experimented with social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Searchles and others to garner a wider audience for our work and to possibly get some traffic to our respective blogs. In theory it seems like a good thing but in reality, social bookmarking leaves a lot to be desired. Examining several of the most popular social news and social bookmarking services, it becomes apparent that the genre suffers from the same malaise across the board leaving the impression that using these services is a complete waste of time.

Why do I have this opinion of these potentially enlightening services? It’s simple, the vast majority of them suffer from what I call the “Lord of the Flies” syndrome. For those of us who have read William Golding’s novel about a group of British boys marooned on a deserted island, who govern themselves with disastrous results, it’s a clear comparison to the social bookmarking genre where more often than not the inmates run the asylum.

Digg - Digg is definitely the biggest and baddest of the bunch. With that reputation comes the power to turn unmetered traffic at a story that hits the front page. It’s not uncommon to see a story that hits the front page get so much traffic that the server goes down amidst a flurry of Diggers. With the upside of Digg also comes a darker, more sinister underside. It’s fairly safe to say that groups of people in the elite eschelon at Digg control what hits the front page and what gets buried. In that Digg is loosely based on social networking principles, article writers who have a large group of friends on Digg can easily manipulate the system to put their stories in front of the masses of sheeple who will click the Digg button in effort to build up their reputation in the community. Sometimes I’ve seen the most poorly written articles from the most poorly written blogs float to the top time after time with the same people digging the stories over and over again. How is this truly social bookmarking? It’s not and I think the reason Google left the deal to purchase Digg on the table was that somebody with half a brain at Google realized that the Digg community is falsely inflated and really are not a good indicator of a truly well written article or story that would have appeal to anyone else other than the Digg community.

Reddit - Reddit is a spin-off of Digg that was started by a bunch kids from University of Virginia. Hardly old enough to buy a drink at a bar, these “experts” seem to misconstrue the meaning of the word social with geek culture. It comes as no suprise that people who have spent 1/4 of their lives in a dorm room would have little or no experience with how the real world works. Just like the “hunters” in Lord of the Flies, the school children who manipulate Reddit gradually become more savage, put on their face paint and completely abandon the concept of society in order to empower their tribe. As with Digg, if you’re not well connected at Reddit, you can guarantee submitting an article you’ve writtin, no matter how important or well written, will get buried by the “hunters” who seem more comfortable communicating in netspeak than in a humanly readable language. Once again, in theory Reddit seems like a wonderful experiment in social storytelling, however, the presence of children who live for popularity contests spoils the true essence of Reddit and makes the experiment a total failure.

Sphinn - Sphinn is basicly a Digg clone. It lacks the originality of Reddit or Searchles and is even more tightly controlled than Digg by those with a vested interest in manipulating the front page. Almost routinely, stories are removed from Sphinn by the over-zealous moderators. Why? I don’t know?? It seems to me that removing articles instead of just letting them slip into the fold is a childish action that is certainly not in tune with Sphinn’s self-proclaimed agenda as an “Internet Marketing News & Discussion Forum”. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Sphinn is merely a marketing tool for it’s founder, The Evil Green Monkey, who by chance happens to be a “self-proclaimed” SEO and search marketing expert named Rob Kerry from Britan. hmmm, maybe he is really Jack and is intent on setting the entire SEO island on fire to hunt down Ralph and kill him.

Andy Beard had this to say about Sphinn

When Launched, Sphinn was described as “Sphinn: Our Social Site For Search & Internet Marketing Professionals” I first wrote about Sphinn 6 months ago, almost to the day, and my emphasis was on attention, market segmentation and building bridges within the industry. In my personal opinion, Sphinn has totally and utterly failed to achieve that, and in some ways it has helped widening the gap between different online marketing professionals.

I have the utmost respect for Andy Beard, mainly because he does not fall into cliques nor is he a sheeple who blindly follows the sheep herders to what they believe are greener pastures. Andy is an independant very much like myself and he is well known for calling things for what they truly are. Sphinn is yet another failure. As the officer in the closing scene of Lord of the Flies tells the children on the beach about to kill Ralph, “I would have expected better from British boys”.

Searchles - Searchles is possibly the most creative and well laid out social news and social bookmarking site, however, once again we find the sheeple and hunters clouding the mix with their ignorance. You can almost guarantee that if you submit anything to Searches that somebody would have to read (ie: not a YouTube video), it will immediately get several “1″ ratings from the hunters who prowl the site looking to play games with the rating system. Call it sheer stupidity or a tragic oversight but Searchles has a 1-5 rating system where 5 is the highest and 1 is the lowest. While articles I’ve submitted into the affiliate marketing community on Searchles have achieved numerous 5 ratings from fellow affiliate marketers, there’s always a few jokers who cast a 1 vote on anything as soon as it’s submitted. I find this rather disappointing because there’s no way somebody could have read an article in 30 seconds and decided it was worthy of casting the lowest vote possible at it. Even more disappointing is checking out the low voter’s profile and finding out that it’s some 13 year old kid who has submitted hundreds of stupid YouTube videos and has never submitted any original content in their history at Searchles. How submitting YouTube videos to a social news site is relevant is beyond me. After all, YouTube does have a search function and if somebody wants to watch a video, they can go find it for themselves. Once again, the hunters have taken over the island and the concept of society has been tossed by the wayside by a bunch of children who think life is a popularity contest.

So what is the future for this genre? Where will social bookmarking and social news propel us in the future. I’m not entirely certain but the one thing I do know is that I will not be wasting my valuable time contributing to high school popularity contests because I hated that game when I was in high school and I’m surely not going to play that game as an adult.

Perhaps the children who operate and populate these sites and social networking sites such as MySpace, FaveBook, Twitter, etc should all take a few hours away from their precious online social networking and get out from behind the computer, go outside into the real world and take a few lessons on networking with real people. They might also take the time to read The Lord of the Flies and try to faintly grasp the concepts of Golding’s allegorical novel about how subcultures created by wild children lost on deserted islands are doomed to failure.

Tagged : Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Searchles, Lord of the Flies

         

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If you’re just starting out in the publishing and webmastering business of if you’re a seasoned professional, two of the hardest things to accomplish are building solid backlinks to your website and getting more traffic to your website. Many experienced professionals will all agree on one particular activity that will not only accomplish both of the aformentioned necessities, but it will provide you with wealth of information and can be a really fun way to promote your websites. The activity I’m talking about is posting and being active on public discussion forums. While there are numerous forums out there and there are new ones popping up everyday, the purpose of this article is to highlight the best forums for webmasters in regards to building solid backlinks and driving traffic to your site. Below are listed, in my opinion, the top 10 forums for webmasters because they all offer signatures that do not have the “nofollow” tag on the links and they all pass “link juice” because they are well indexed by the search engines. Please note, part of getting a good response from forums includes being a constructive member of the community, so before I list the forums, I’ll give a short list of do’s and don’t regarding behaviour in these online communities.

The Do’s

• Do be friendly, remember the old adage “You can attract more flies with honey”
• Do be helpful and share your knowledge, you’ll be suprised how people take to helpful posters
• Be positive. If you don’t have something good to say, don’t say anything at all.
• Stay on topic with discussions and don’t lead them astray.
• Make friends with people and answer all non-spam PM’s (private messages)

The Dont’s

• Don’t join a forum and immediately start posting links to your site.
• Don’t spam forums with junk posts only to get your links in
• Don’t be negative and/or take things personal
• Don’t send spam PM’s (private messages)
• Don’t offend the moderators or owners of a forum you’re on

Now that we’ve gone through some of the basic Do’s and Dont’s of forum ettiquite, on to the list of my top 10 favorite forums.

Top 10 Discussion Forums

• #1 DigitalPoint - Hands down, DigitalPoint is the best Webmaster Forum out there.
• #2 SitePoint - Sitepoint is another great Webmaster Forum.
• #3 V7 Networks - V7 is a fantastic resource and fun place to post.
• #4 Code4Gold Forums - Allows the biggest signatures.
• #5 Webmaster-Talk - Another new forum but growwing rapidly.
• #6 BloggerTalk - For bloggers, passes “link juice”.
• #7 5StarAffiliatePrograms - One of my personal favorites.
• #8 Warrior Forum - A top notch marketing forum.
• #9 Webmasters Help - Another new forum that shows potential.
• #10 Searchen Forums - This one throws nice “link juice”.

If you’re not taking full advantage of Discussion Forums, you’re missing out on one of the greatest tools for promotion. There’s not a successful webmaster out there who hasn’t, at one time or another, utilized forums as a tool for promotion. If you’re the shy type, the great thing about forums is that nobody really knows who you are, so there’s nothing to be worried about, you don’t have to be Britney Spears to get attention, all you have to do is be yourself and get involved in the discussions. Take the plunge and you’ll be glad you did !!!

Cheers,
Dave

         

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