Tips to keep Entrecard account alive

Its been a very long gap again. But, I am still around. Though, I won't start posting at a reasonable frequency anytime soon. I would like to clear my PMP (Project Management Professional) exam in the next two or three months.

Anyway, I received few useful comments to my earlier post on Warning from Entrecard. I thought it would be useful if I can share some of them with you all.

1. Eric from Blog De Manila said "Just write an article if you have time and Schedule it for posting...or invite some Guest Poster in your blog!". This is a good suggestion. If you can get some one to post for you, commonly known as guest posting, it would keep your blog alive. For this to happen, of course, your blog should be either popular or at least have a good PageRank. This will encourage people to post on your blog, in return they will be getting some good traffic or some benefits by riding on your Google PR.

2. Angeltraveler from PaulinesRants said "When I don't have a lot of time I can add some videos or favorite photos and that will keep your account active. Doesn't take long." Once again, this is a good suggestion to keep your blog alive. But, be careful, to keep the photos or videos related to your main content of the blog. For personal blogs, it does not matter what content you post. But, for blogs with specific niche, you need to spend time in filtering the right content for your blog.

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Warning from Entrecard

I had been away from blogging for quite some time. I just noticed that my last post here was more than 100 days ago. My last post was published on July 30, 2009. I was attending a part-time course for about two months and had very little time to look into anything else. My plate was full with my full time work, part time course and family. So, I was not surprised when I received a warning from Entrecard.

Entrecard warned me to update my blog to avoid deletion. So, this update is in a way prompted by them. But, with the current work load, I am not sure I will be updating my blog regularly. I am also going on a long holiday in December and won't be back until Christmas.

Entrecard needs lot of effort and it looks like I am not up to it at this stage. I do not want to lose my Entrecard account before consuming all my hard earned points there. So, probably, I will be sending my points lavishly on advertising. Then, most likely, I will leave my Entrecard account to die unless something changes drastically over the next couple of months.

Here is the warning from Entrecard, for those of you who might be interested:

Your account 'Widgets for Blogger' on entrecard.com has been warned. The administrator provided the following message:

Please update your blog to avoid deletion from the Entrecard system. Thank you

Please contact support@entrecard.com if you have any questions regarding this warning.

PLEASE NOTE: You are expected to resolve this issue promptly. Failure to do so will result in the removal of your Entrecard account.

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Do I follow what I say?

I just wanted to address a comment from Sandy regarding the content of my earlier post titled "Keep it Simple for Adsense Success". Please read Sandy’s comment before we go further:

Sandy’s Comment on “Keep it Simple for Adsense Success”

"You don't see to practice what you preach...in that you say keep it simple and don't distract readers with subscriptions; but right in your post you say if you want more information to subscribe?

I'm not doing well with adsense, but everything I read say join join join, subscribe etc. Get your name in directories, get links out there. You post is the first I've seen that says do adsense and nothing else, so I wonder about it. Just really not sure what to make of it."

Why Sandy is frustrated?
I appreciate Sandy for being straight to the point. I can understand her frustration and I felt that her doubts should be cleared. I could have answered this as part of the comments, but I felt the answer should reach most of my readers who may have similar questions.

Why bloggers contradict?
You cannot learn the intricacies of blogging without reading other blogs or learning from the experience of established bloggers. But, the difficulty is you get contradicting suggestions/ advise from different bloggers. What should I do? One blogger tells me that Stumbleupon is the best for blog traffic. Another guy tells me that Google is the best source of traffic. Where do I stand then? Do I follow blogger A or blogger B? As it always happens in real world, you have to filter good information and weed away the bad information. Most importantly, you have to choose the right information that applies to your blogging goals.

Reply to Sandy
1. Sandy, when I said "don’t distract readers" I meant only for blogs that use Adsense ads. If you take a close look at this blog, I don’t use Adsense on this blog. So, the rules I have listed in the earlier post does not apply to this blog. If you are using Adsense on your blog, keep the distraction minimal. I do this on my blogs which use Adsense. The idea is to get the attention of the reader on the Adsense ads, rather than splitting his attention between an Entrecard ad, ten Adgitize ads, four CMF ads and a row of Project Wonderful ads. What is the probability of someone clicking on your Adsense ad?

2. Regarding joining blog directories or getting links, it is fine. The amount of incoming links from quality sites with keyword-anchored text is very important for you to move up in the search engine rankings. Getting links is certainly very important. I did not say “do nothing else”. But, while you spend time on off-site optimization you should also concentrate on your on-site optimization. Your primary goal should be to get search engine traffic.

I am just trying to share my experience with my readers and fellow bloggers. I have made mistakes and learned from them. Blogging is trial and error. If you are not going to try something, you are not going to learn. I always try many things. If it works, fine. If not, along the way, I may fine-tune my strategies.

Conclusion
Sandy, by the way, I would like to add much more on your comment. But, I have little time to add further. I will come back with further content on this in my next post. Feel free to shoot further questions that you may have.

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Make Money with Today.com

Today.com is a blogging platform that makes writing and maintaining a blog easy. It pays you for blogging, without restricting you. When you sign up, you are given a VIP Blogger status that allows you to earn money based on the page impressions your blog generates. Here is my trial blog on Today.com, Cricket and India; take a look if you are interested.

Who should write for Today.com?
Today.com is suitable for bloggers who are unable to make significant money with their normal blog, be it on Blogger, Wordpress or self-hosted. Today.com pays you $2.00 per one thousand page impressions. Compare this with your Adsense earnings. If you struggle to reach $2.00 eCPM, then Today.com is worth a try. All you have to do is concentrate on your blogging and promotion of your blog. The advertisement part is taken care of by Today.com.

How to generate traffic to your blog?
I personally prefer search engine traffic. I find that Today.com blogs are generally doing well on search engines, similar to Blogger blogs. So, you have to get enough backlinks for your primary keyword and while blogging target your primary keyword and secondary keywords. Look at the picture below. This is a screenshot from my trial blog.


As you can see, I am not trying any blog promotion other than getting traffic from search engines like, Google and Yahoo. All I did is to create a blog, get some keyword-anchored backlinks and wrote content targeting my keywords. I am not getting tons of traffic, but I am having enough to keep the blog going. If you take a close look, I did get some traffic from Entrecard and Stumbleupon. But, I have removed Entrecard widget since, as I do not have enough time to drop cards. What I want is traffic without any effort, or simply to put, I want Search Engine Traffic.

Can I use Entrecard?
Of course, you can use it. But, ensure that you disable paid advertisements in your advert settings of Entrecard. So, if you are a dropaholic with 300 drops a day, then probably you could easily get thousand of unique visits to your blog. Today.com has no restriction, so far, on where the traffic comes from. You can get traffic from Entrecard, Digg, Stumbleupon or any social networks. It does not matter.

Important Points

• Spend time before deciding on your topic. It is better to have a topic that is less competitive, but have significant amount of search traffic.


• Once you decided your topic, choose your URL. Ensure that your primary keyword is included in the URL. This is very important as you cannot change your URL once you have committed.


• Post few articles and start looking for backlinks. Backlinks helps to quickly get indexed by Google.


• Keep posting regularly with your primary/ secondary keywords until search engine traffic starts to flow in.


• Now, you can slow down your posting frequency and post only when you are free. Search engines will take care of sending regular traffic to you.

How to sign up?
You can sign up by clicking here. This is an affiliate link and I thank you for signing up through me. Today.com pays $5.00 for every successful referral, if the referral goes on to post at least 30 individual posts on 30 individual days.

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What is SEO?

SEO is one of the often heard words in blogging circle. If you are blogging for a while, you would have already known what SEO means. For new bloggers, SEO is something alien. In this post, I make an attempt to introduce SEO for beginners.

What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Are we going to optimize the search engine then? No, we are actually going to optimize our blog or website to gain some traffic from search engines. You can achieve Search Engine Optimization by improving internally (on-site) and externally (off-site) in order to increase the traffic from search engines.

What is a search engine?
A search engine is basically a tool or program designed to search for information on the internet. Examples of search engines include Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, Excite and so on. Each search engine has a proprietary algorithm that is used to extract relevant information from web based on several factors. Google is widely recognized as the biggest search engine currently.

How SEO helps in blogging?
A new blogger will know how difficult it is to get visitors to his/ her blog or web site. An experienced blogger knows how difficult it is to sustain visitors/ readers. Search engines provide a regular flow of visitors to your site if you can get on to their search engine result pages. To appear on the search engine results, you have to optimize your blog for search engines. Some of you may already be optimizing your blog without realizing what is Search engine optimization. A well written blog with focussed content will automatically achieve SEO. But, with a little bit further effort, the blog can go a long way in establishing substantial amount of traffic from search engines. The idea is if you can regularly feature in the first page of Google’s search result for a few keywords, then you need not spend time in promoting your blog.

How to achieve SEO?
SEO needs you to change your writing approach. You have to look at each and every aspect of your blog from the viewpoint of search engines. Some bloggers are of the opinion that a blog optimized for search engines are not good for reading. It is not always true. You can write a blog with readers in mind as well as search engines in mind. It is in your hands to understand the needs of the two groups and address them effectively.

When should I start SEO?
You need to have SEO in mind even before you commence blogging. The URL of your blog also plays an important role. But, if you already have an established blog and your URL does not reflect what your blog is about, don’t worry (My blog URL has very little relation to what I write). There are other areas you can improve on. For example, your blog title, blog description, post title and the content of your blog.

Let us start with internal tweaking of the blog and then move on to external tweaking to achieve some sort of Search Engine Optimization. I will address some of the SEO techniques in my future posts. I am not an SEO expert, but I would like to share some of the simple techniques that have proved successful to me. Please subscribe to my feed if you like this post

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Say No to Sponsored Posts

I have decided to put an end to writing sponsored/ paid reviews. In fact, I had not been writing any paid posts for the past six months. I also recommend my readers/ other fellow bloggers to stop writing for payment. To start off, I have removed the affiliate links to paid posts site from my "Money Makers" list on the side bar.

Why "No" to Sponsored Posts?
I am not going against any particular company. But, generally, I lost interest in the paid posts arena. I had built up this site from scratch and went up to PR4. But, now it stands at PR0. But, you may ask, who cares about Google PR? Many of us, including me, have argued that we can survive without Google. Let us acknowledge, friends, it is not easy to get traffic without the help of the biggest search engine.

I had been ranking in the front page for many keywords, but Google slowly de-indexed me from the Search Engine Results. Now, I had to work hard for each and every visitor. Yes, I am still getting considerable traffic through other sources like Entrecard, BloggingZoom, myLot, and so on. But, I have to earn each visitor. To get a visitor from Entrecard, I have to drop a card. You cannot survive ever this way.

While I am still getting some money through affiliate links for sponsored posts site, I felt it is not right to sell something which I don't like myself. You might still see posts related to Smorty, PayPerPost and similar sites here. But, I will remove the affiliate links eventually so that no one goes through me.

Believe me, Google is All. If you want to survive in the blogging world, play by the rules of the biggest search engine. Otherwise, the chances are high that you will perish.

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Top Droppers Widget for Blogger

In the previous post, we learnt how to install the Recent Droppers widget for Blogger.  In this post, I am going to cover the Top Droppers widget for Blogger.

The Top droppers widget is meant to display the links of top droppers from Entrecard on your sidebar. While recent droppers widget will reward every dropper for a short period of time, the top droppers widget will reward only bloggers who consistently drops on you. If you have a good blog, then the droppers will fight hard to get a link from you. In return, you might get regular droppers.

Now, we will see how to install the Top Droppers Widget for Blogger/ Blogspot. If you have followed my instructions to install the Recent Droppers widget, you will find the instructions here very similar.

How to install the widget?

1. Log in to your Entrecard account


2. Click on the "Statistics" button, located on the top menu.
   
   


3. Scroll down the Statistics page to a section titled "Top card droppers". You will see an orange colour RSS button besides the title. Click on the feed button.
   
   


4. This will open a new window. Look at the address bar in your browser window. The address should look like "http://entrecard.com/feeds/top_droppers/XXXXXXXXXX/rss2.0". Copy the address; we need to use this later in Blogger to create the widget


5. Now, log in to your Blogger account


6. On your Blogger Dashboard, click on the "Layout" link
   
   


7. This will take you to the "Page Elements" tab. Decide where you want to insert the recent droppers widget and click on the "Add a Gadget" link accordingly.
   
   


8. Scroll down the list, find a gadget titled "Feed" and click on the "+" button
   
   


9. This will open the "Configure Feed" window. Here, you need to paste the URL copied from Entrecard (Refer to step 4). Click on the "Continue" button


10. If you have pasted the feed URL correctly, you should see a prview of your top droppers in the window now


11. Blogger allows you to display a maximum of 5 droppers. If you want to display less than 5 links, select the number accordingly. Once you are satisfied, click "Save"

That completes the installation of your Top Entrecard droppers widget. Feel free to post your queries here, if you have any. Please subscribe to my feed if you like this post

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Recent Droppers Widget for Blogger

If you are using Entrecard for building up your traffic, then this widget is for you. I am going to call this as Recent Droppers widget for Blogger/ Blogspot. You may call this as Latest Droppers widget or Entrecard Droppers widget or as you may wish.

The widget is meant to display the links of recent droppers from Entrecard on your sidebar. This list will be a dynamic one and will change as entrecarders drop into your Entrecard widget. The idea is to reward all your droppers for a short period of time with a link to their blog. Now, I will explain how to install the widget. It is going to be very simple.

How to install the widget?

1. Log in to your Entrecard account


2. On the top right hand corner of your Dashboard, look for the orange colour feed button
   
   


3. Click on the feed button


4. This will open a new window. Look at the address bar in your browser window. The address should look like "http://entrecard.com/feeds/inbox/XXXXXXXXXX/rss2.0". Copy the address; we need to use this later in Blogger to create the widget


5. Now, log in to your Blogger account


6. On your Blogger Dashboard, click on the "Layout" link
   
   


7. This will take you to the "Page Elements" tab. Decide where you want to insert the recent droppers widget and click on the "Add a Gadget" link accordingly.
   
   


8. Scroll down the list, find a gadget titled "Feed" and click on the "+" button
   
   


9. This will open the "Configure Feed" window. Here, you need to paste the URL copied from Entrecard (Refer to step 4). Click on the "Continue" button
   
   


10. If you have pasted the feed URL correctly, you should see a prview of your recent droppers in the window now
    
    


11. Blogger allows you to display a maximum of 5 droppers. If you want to display less than 5 links, select the number accordingly. Once you are satisfied, click "Save"

That completes the installation of your recent Entrecard droppers widget. Feel free to post your queries here, if you have any. Please subscribe to my feed if you like this post

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Build Traffic With Entrecard

Entrecard provides a platform for bloggers to network and benefit from each other. I heard of Entrecard sometime ago, but I was reluctant to join them. I was of the opinion that the business model of Entrecard will not succeed. My experience with BlogRush was still fresh in mind. But, after reading many discussions supporting Entrecard, I decided to jump in and try it out myself. So, I signed up with Entrecard yesterday.

Concept of Entrecard
The concept of Entrecard is simple. If you visit a blog from their network, you get credit points and the owner of the blog you visited also gets credit points. These are called Entrecard Credit and shortly known as “ec” in the network.

What can I do with the Entrecard Credit?
The most important thing you can do is to use the credit to advertise on other blogs in the network. You have to sell your credit points to earn the advertising space in the blog of your choice. Depending on the popularity of the blog you would like to advertise, the credit points would vary. The higher the popularity, the more points you need to transfer. The same goes if someone wants to advertise on your blog. They have to transfer credit to you to buy space from your blog.

Where is the advertising space for Entrecard?
The advertising space comes in the form of a widget that resides on your sidebar. You have to install the code supplied by Entrecard to activate this. You will receive a notification if someone would like to advertise on your blog. Once you approve a request for advertisement, the widget will display the image/ text of the requester. A click on to the widget will lead you to the advertiser’s blog.

What is the first impression?
Looks good. In about 24 hours, I got about 35 visitors through Entrecard. I am not sure whether this is just an initial burst or will continue. As of now, I am getting some good traffic which is certain to boost my Alexa Rank, if not anything else.

If you are interested, please sign up with Entrecard for free. Please subscribe to my feed if you like this post.

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