Seven To Ten

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 do not usually pay attention to domain names. I know it is a lucrative business given that some names attract substantial amount of traffic which can be monetized. So far, I am dabbling in the domain name business to make extra money only.

For my own blogs, I choose any name which sounds good and from traffic indications (meaning zero hits), it seems to be special to me alone. There are of course certain techniques involved in choosing a proper domain name, whether you want to park it and milk the residual advertisement income or start a personal/business blog.

The question on how to choose a domain name for your blog is best answered by Problogger. In that very detailed post, he mentioned about the goals, target audience, keywords, branding, future trends, name length, memorability, legal issues, similar domains, hypens, dot coms, etc.

If you master what all the pointers, you are now ready to hunt for diamonds in the rough. I know that the prices some domain marketers or owners are willing to pay is incredibly high, once you have been to domain name auctions.

So if you secure a domain name which can generate traffic on its own, you are on to something good. Like real estate, it is a prime asset for you.

Most successful blogs had been active for quite a long time. Of course, the definition of success varies according to individuals.

But looking at the Technorati top 100 or the very best blogs in your niche areas, you will notice that there is at least 2 years of blogging before they experience an exponential spike in readers.

Of course, some blogs, through luck, excellent content and shrewd marketing, rise through the ranks faster.

If you have neither of the three qualities in abundance, take a long term approach and stick to it. You can’t go wrong with patience. Traffic will come, and with it, lots of money.

Advertisers have to lower their expectations when it comes to alexa ranking. John Chow reported on his site a change in ranking system by alexa.

Like everybody else, his blog is affected but he has little complaints. Because his blog has been established to such a popularity level that PR and alexa ranking doesn’t hurt his earnings any more.

Previously, Alexa only consider users who downloaded and installed alexa toolbar. This did not sufficiently capture the traffic data as certain segments, like make money or affiliate marketing tend to show higher alexa ranking than technology websites where the users are more savvy and believe the alexa toolbar to be nothing more than a piece of spyware.

No doubt, the change is a positive move as the ranking is now a more accurate reflection of internet traffic for blogs and websites. But as bloggers, we have to do more promotion and marketing to drive traffic which can help us to push or even maintain the existing alexa ranking.

At this point of time, I think advertisers who strictly look at alexa ranking to determine a blog’s popularity have to appreciate the change, else a lot of websites may suffer as a result.

We cannot do without friends if we want to succeed on the net, whether as a blogger or an affiliate marketer. Investing your time in any social community will pay off in the long run. Social networks are the rave right now, not without good reason.

I believe they can replace forums in the long run as members prefer to hang out there to discuss their favorite topics. There are so many activities going on at the same time, making new friends, renewing old friendship, uploading photos albums, joining or creating groups, blog posting, live chatting and listening to latest mp3 hits.

I already know of Stumble, Digg, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, etc. The new kid on the block is 3GB Community. I found about them through the buzz built by other bloggers.

In order to penetrate an already saturated market, new upstarts have to differentiate themselves. 3GB has several unique features, one of which is a radio station. It allows members to listen to albums of their favorite stars.

Another interesting aspect is their focus on the Arabic community around the world. Since the primary language is English, members from Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, etc will love the 3GB as they understand English well.

I love the live chat feature and also the way you can separate friends into family, co-worker, etc. This is especially useful when you have hundreds or thousands of friends - you will appreciate the effort to organize them into various friend categories.

If you have time to spare, then join 3gb community 3gb.biz today and be among the early pioneers.

There is a fine line between email marketing and spam. You have to be careful when you are using this strategy to promote your products or services, else you get on the wrong side of the law. The main thing is to tie up with a reputable email marketing agency.

I have browsed through this website, iContact, and it looks impressive with a cliente boasting Fortune 500 companies (like Bank of America, Ford, Nissan, Super 8 Motel) and 183,865 users.

iContact has a user-friendly interface, over 300 professionally designed email templates, and also include, at no additional cost, surveying, autoresponder, and blogging tools to allow businesses to interact with prospects, customers, and subscribers.

Sending out email newsletters is effective since they provide a near perfect inbox deliverability. You can also add a sign-up form to your web site, segment your list, and manage your subscribers. The application allows you to track email performances (opens and clickthroughs) in real time with their charts.

Basic monthly prices start at $9.95, increasing proportionally with your list size. For corporations, they offer an Enterprise product that starts at $660/month.

As a blogger, I think this service is useful in pushing my product to a wide audience. Since emarketing is such a sensitive issue, I prefer to leave it to the pros, put it on autopilot and get great deliverability.

The monthly fee may put some people off especially when there is no revenue in the early days but you can try it out for a few months, once the traffic starts coming in, you can decide to continue with the service or not. By the way, there is a 15 day free trial of iContact. Check out the site today!

What is a blog carnival? Think of an event where a lot of people gather for the fun and entertainment. A blog carnival is not too far away from that.

As a blogger, you need links and in a blog carnival, you will find an array links pointing to blog posts about a niche topic. Usually, there are many editions of a blog carnival, and every week, different blogs will host it. It is easy to participate, as an example, go to the Blog Carnival website, browse around for relevant topics and submit your entries.

This is a simple yet effective method to promote your blog when you are starting out. The carnivals will give you exposure in the form of high quality relevant traffic and back links. Additionally it will also give you the possibility to interact with fellow bloggers.

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?

We are constantly reminded about having solid, rich content. It is said to be one of best tools to make money online.

Having a content-rich website is a must when it comes to online revenue from the web these days; if you don’t have useful content on your site you don’t stand a chance. And the extra money is handy.

Creating rich content for your website is what matters. Fanciful graphics and colorful pictures are great, but rich content that gets traffic is key to the success of any website out there.

I will try to make my content as rich as possible and hope for the best.

I was thinking of purchasing a few thousands unique visitors from an expired domain traffic company and another 10,000 of the same from other sources.

I will test it out and see what is the conversion stats. Zero contribution from a high number of uniques is no good and must be improved asap.

For some of the seasoned marketers, they may not like the idea of purchasing bulk traffic since the source and quality of the expired domain traffic, but testing wouldn’t hurt too much.