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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Everybody loves Wordpress plugins. After all, that’s what makes Wordpress such a great choice for blogging or CMS needs. Considering the tremendous appeal for the latest and greatest plugins it seemed like a good idea to post some of them every Sunday as a regular feature of this blog.

Today we have a handful of interesting new extensions for your Wordpress installation from creative minds who have given their time freely into the Wordpress community. Without further ado, here are today’s latest and greatest plugins.

Avatars for Comment Feeds - A new Wordpress plugin that adds avatars to your comment RSS feed. The plugin works off Gravatars using the bulit-in functionality added as of WordPress 2.5 release. The plugin lets you set the size of the avatar, between 10 and 96 pixels and it will even add a snapshot from websnapr.com to the pingbacks and trackbacks you receive on your blog.

G4B Photo Gallery Plugin - Created by Gavin Vickery, this plugin provides a minimalistic method to include a complete photo gallery anywhere on your blog. You can adjust thumbnail and photo size in settings page and the plugin crops or resizes photos proportionally to your settings. G4B Photo Gallery Plugin currently supports Wordpress 2.2 - 2.6.2 installs.

DashboardZone Plugin - This is a very creative plugin which aims to help you effectively track your blogging goals. Goals you can set to be tracked are total number of posts, average comments per post and posts per month. Tracking these facets of your blog can help you convert your blog visitors into regular readers which is the ultimate goal of any blogger.

Wordpress Help Desk - Although this plugin is currently in beta mode, it offers a comprehensive integrated help desk and trouble ticketing system that helps you support your blog visitors and resolve issues quickly. This plugin could be extremely helpful for any businesses using Wordpress as a CMS system.

Well, that’s it for this weeks plugins. Be sure to check back next week for more great Wordpress plugins or subscribe to our RSS feed to be alerted when we post another batch next Sunday !!

Happy Publishing,
Dave

         

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 It appears Google has been rolling out their pagerank updates with a frequency not seen since 2004/2005. Last year, pagerank updates were few and far between but this year we’ve been seeing them every few months. For the most part, these updates have been downgrades for the vast majority of bloggers and webmasters as seen here, here, here and here.

On the other hand, it seems some three month old blogs are being rewarded with a PR5 from a PR0 ??? I really think granting a three month old blog a PR5 authority simply because it’s distributing free Wordpress themes with links back to the blog in the footer is utterly ridiculous.

If the afformentioned scenario didn’t get your blood boiling and you want to have an aneurysm, check out this post about a network of bidding directories that have seen a significant increase in pagerank. Bidding directories? Google has been adamant about the fact that buying and selling text links for pagerank value is prohibited. Remember how Google destroyed PayPerPost bloggers last year? Ok, so somebody writing a paid blog post is essentially more improper in Google’s eyes than having people bid for text links on a site with no content ?

What the hell is Google thinking?

It seems more and more older, well established blogs are getting whacked in the pagerank department these days because Google is definitely not following up on policing natural link building, which they profess as a guideline for webmasters to follow. Google’s Matt Cutts has stated time and again that links should be relative to a blog or site’s niche, which means a “free template blog” getting backlinks from a “celebrity wallpaper blog” should not weigh in as relative. So why isn’t Google following their own standards which they have strongarmed white hat webmasters into following?

One blogger wrote about dofollow pagerank updates and how 3/5 of the blogs in his dofollow blog directory which were PR5 had dropped in this update. Looks like Google hates dofollow blogs so once again, webmasters and bloggers must bow down and alter their policies regarding dofollow comments as a reward to commentors.

Another blogger took it upon himself to do a fair value pagerank analysis of many of the various MMO (Make Money Online) bloggers. The assessment lists the blog, it’s current paregrank and what the blogger believes the pagerank should really be. hmmm, I wonder if he read 10 secret Confessions of the Super Affiliate?? Probably not.

I’m beginning to see that the old adage “nice people finish last” or “honest people never get ahead” certainly rings true, especially where anything related to Google is concerned. However, I refuse to be bullied into going “black hat” or changing the way I choose to operate my sites and blogs because Google wants to shoot themselves in the foot by alienating more experienced webmasters with their kindergarten “gold star” Google pagerank.

         

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