SevenToTen - Blogging About Everything

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There are some significant changes in Entrecard which are supposedly good for the long term. These are listed below.

1. Buy credits for less

Entrecard is now selling 1,000 credits for $6.00. You can buy them at 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.

I believe such changes are necessary to put Entrecard on a stronger footing. Servers need to be upgraded big time and hopefully, they get more funds from selling of credits and advertisements.

For the time being, independent credit sales or credit transfers among members are prohibited, thus members who advertise heavily have no choice but to click 300 sites per day or fork out the $6 for 1000 credits.

I wouldn’t mind spending more on Entrecard if the end result is higher quality traffic, comments, and subscribers and better serps.

I have wondered why some posts get dugg more than others. It seems that there are groups of digg users who help some articles to score and get onto the front page.

I first knew about their presence from forums and you can join these groups and send articles to them for some digging. Bloggers can benefit from the exposure in terms of adsense earnings, traffic, subscribers, alexa ranking, back links, etc.

Certainly, this is manipulation of articles (and even cheating) to gain popularity, but I found that the standard of diggs have not decreased substantially as a result. There is a bury button if you do not like the article for either its junk or excessively-promotional content.

Overall, I still enjoy the home page reads. What is your experience of digg?

I just love this letter from Playgirl to former New York governor, Eliot Spitzer. A good does of humor on the back of a scandal…

Playgirl is offering Spitzer a $1 million deal to strip naked and pose for their magazine. This is not something to be sniffed at. That guy’s political career is over; and he is out of job, may be in debt soon.

For Playgirl, it is a win-win situation. Even if Spitzer says no, the amount of free publicity is already tremendous, considering it is just a simple but creative press release.

And if Spitzer says yes, wooh, the shit hit the fan. This will be the best selling issue of Playgirl, lots of advertisers and future subscribers - worth much, much more than the $1 million dollar paycheck. I know, because my wife told me she will love to see Spitzer in the buff too…