Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Post EntreCard Blog Promotion
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 10/04/2009 - 17:47Monday, the latest changes to EntreCard are scheduled to take affect and various people are saying their goodbyes. I think I’ll weather this latest storm out as well and stick around. However, I have thought more seriously about leaving and offer up recommendations for people leaving as well as for those of us being left behind.
EntreCard is different things to different people, so depending on your own reasons for using and/or leaving EntreCard, different parts of the recommendation may mean more or less to you.
Promoting your blog
One of the most important reasons I use EntreCard is to promote my blog. There are people that have visited my blog in the past through EntreCard that will no long be coming to my blog because they are leaving EntreCard. Many of them have moved over to CMF Ads and I’ve placed ads on their site through CMF Ads. Some of them are also on Adgitize, so I show up on their blogs from time to time as well. A few of them that filled out my survey include Turnip of Power, Top Ten Blog Tips, A Postcard a Day, Healthy Lifestyle Blogzine, Mom's Cafe Home Cooking, Internet Marketing with Steven Wilson, libdrone, That Grrl, and sixmats.com.
So far, I’ve found Adgitize ads to drive more traffic to my site than EntreCard or CMF Ads.
Monetizing your blog
Another aspect of advertising is monetizing your blog. I’ve used several different sites, including Google Adsense, Chitika, Amazon, and other large ad networks to serve ads. I don’t do a lot with this advertising and don’t give it prominent positions. Each of them provide a small amount of income from time to time, and every once in a while, provides a nice payoff. I did finally get around to linking my Google Analytics to my Google Adsense.
In terms of the bloggers advertising networks, Adgitize has consistently been the best performer. It usually only brings in a couple dollars after expenses, but essentially, I get paid by Adgitize for generating traffic to my site. A very stark contrast to EntreCard.
For Adgitize, I pay $14/month for my advertisement. As an advertisers, I earn about $4 worth of credits each month, so my real cost is more like $10. I earn another $4 by writing a post every day. It is good practice to write a post every day, so the added discipline helps. Then, I get about $4/day for visiting other sites through Adgitize. If these are EntreCard sites as well, which they usually are, it fits in with the EntreCard dropping. That leaves me with $2/month to cover through advertising revenue. My calculations are that most sites get up to about $8/month for advertisements on Adgitize.
Adgitize calculates the earnings based on the number of page views and the number of ad views. Traditionally, I had three Adgitize ads showing at a time. I like the idea of showing multiple Adgitize ads. People surfing my site through Adgitize have three exit points. Others add Adgitize at the bottom of their page, thus increasing the number of ad views, the number of exit points, and providing good above the fold and below the fold locations. I’ve now added three more ads at the bottom of my page.
My guess is that I make about $5/month on CMF Ads which I re-invest by advertising on other CMF sites. It doesn’t bring me a lot of traffic and I could perhaps optimize my advertising there as well as the rate that I charge for CMF Ads. Sometimes, you may get better total revenue by lowering your ad rates or adding more ads to view. On my survey, a lot of people said they used CMF Ads, which I do as well. However, I just don’t use it as extensively as other sites.
Recent Readers
Another thing that EntreCard does is that it provides information about people who have recently dropped cards on you. This is a nice improvement over the recent reader sites like MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog. With those sites, someone might have read your site and not liked it. In theory, a person visiting with EntreCard would only drop cards on sites that they like. However, in practice, that does not seem to be the case.
In my survey, I found that many more respondents use BlogCatalog than use MyBlogLog. This fits data that I get from Google Analytics that I get four times the traffic from BlogCatalog as I do from MyBlogLog. Because of this, I’ve moved BlogCatalog up on my screen and MyBlogLog down. These sites don’t generate a lot of traffic and 40% of people leaving EntreCard do not use them. However, if I were leaving, I would use BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog the way I use the EntreCard inbox now.
MicroPayments
The one thing that EntreCard has that I haven’t found a good replacement for in other sites is a working system of micropayments. The EntreCard micropayment model is broken in that there isn’t a good way to cash out credits. Personally, I think a micropayment system, tying into some of the big players in micropayments from the gaming space, like Offerpal would be great. If I could easily drop credits on friends that would be great. Anyone who wants to collaborate on a viable blogging micropayment system should drop me a note.
Traffic Exchanges
For many people, it seems like EntreCard was an informal traffic exchange. Drop a card on me, and I’ll drop one on you. The only traffic exchange that I pay any attention to is BlogExplosion. I sometimes use this to find new sites to visit and get surprisingly good traffic from them. Interestingly, nearly half of the EntreCard diaspora that filled out my survey does not use BlogExplosion.
Of course, the best way to increase readership is to write good content, and I enjoy visiting the blogs that have well written articles. With that, I’m giving a shout out today to Ask the Blogster for EntreCard: Great Concept, No Business Plan and Advertising Is Not Free—It’s Too Expensive & Other Paradox In Entrecard Town. Writing great content and linking to other articles that you like is always a great way to promote your own blog.
So, have I hit the way you promote your blog? Are there things I should have suggested and missed?
Update:
As I continue visiting various sites, I just came across EntreWas, which is an effort for people who connected via EntreCard to stay connected. It seems like a great idea.
Blog Networking: EntreCard, Adgitize, CMF Ads and Beyond
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/03/2009 - 11:22There are many blogs out there, and many reasons that people write blogs. Some blogs are personal, some are news, some are commentary, and so on. There are many different reasons that people try to bring traffic to their blogs. It might be to earn money from advertising, to get more people exposed to ones viewpoints, or perhaps just another way to compete. The ways that people try to get traffic is also manifold and frequently changing.
EntreCard is one of the most notorious sites. It can drive a lot of traffic, but people question the quality of the traffic and even more significantly the ability of their management to run the site effectively.
Which Blog Advertising Networks do you use?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 09/26/2009 - 08:50As a new batch of bloggers prepare to leave EntreCard, I'd like to build up a spreadsheet of who is using which networks. I'll be using this to determine my own advertising decisions and will share information from that I gather from the spreadsheet.
If you use, or have used EntreCard, Adgitize, CMF Ads, Project Wonderland, or other blog advertising networks in the past or currently, please fill out the form below:
EntreCard Updates
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 09/25/2009 - 10:09Bloggers seeking traffic for their blogs need two things. The first is good content, and the second is to be findable. The first is just a matter of good writing. The second is more challenging. There are Search Engine Optimizations experts out there that will tell you all kinds of methods of getting incoming links, building your mailing list, getting people to subscribe to your RSS feed and so on. The bottom line is that you need to promote your site, and ideally do it where you are likely to find potential regular readers.
This is often done through link exchanges, traffic or click exchanges, and what I like to call blogger advertising networks. Many of these exchanges or networks have features from several categories and people will argue about whether a site is a link exchange, a click exchange, or an advertising network various levels of praise or derision.
One of the most notorious such networks is EntreCard. A large community has built up around EntreCard and it is amazing to see how they manage to continue in spite of repeated management snafus. One of the biggest was the way they mishandled the introduction of paid advertising. Many people complained, many people left, but still they muddled along. Then, they changed the payout for clicking on advertising sites. This resulted in more complaining, as well as more people leaving or cutting back their activities on EntreCard.
Now, they have announce that they are bringing back paid advertising in a different form and more sites are leaving. What is unfortunate is that the sites leaving tend to be the ones with the best content, such as Kitchen Retro, The Virtual Dime Museum, Symphony of Love and Politicus. This comes back to the key issue of any blogging: good content. Some of the sites producing the best content are leaving EntreCard, which makes EntreCard much less desirable a place to advertise or surf.
Follow Friday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 09/18/2009 - 11:39@digiday @scottyhendo @shivsingh @StephanieSAM @ckieff @JasonDPG @annemai @KenRobbins @sofadude @LizaPost @DragonSearch @fromedome @mmathias @HartHooton @Alirana @tanyachadha @chrisfield
Every Friday many people in Social Media, especially on Twitter, but also on blogs and other sites, share lists of people that they enjoy following on social media sites. On my blog, Orient Lodge, I regularly participate in this. However, after the Digiday conferences in New York on Thursday, I thought it would be an interesting post for Digiday:Daily. I use TwitterFeed to post the title and lede of my blog post, along with a link to Twitter, and I use the Twitter App on Facebook to pull the Tweet and use it as my status on Facebook. With that, let me discuss some of the people from the Digiday events on Thursday that are well worth following.
@scottyhendo presented “The Future of Cause Marketing: Pledge to End Hunger Case Study”. He mentioned that the head of Tyson said a brand engaging in cause marketing should be like the moon, reflecting the light of the cause, in this case hunger. To illustrate his point, he provided a graph of the number of followers that he, Tyson Foods and the Pledge to End Hunger drive had during the campaign. The campaigns followers skyrocketed while his followers and the Tyson food followers remained on a standard trajectory.
I’ve often wondered how appearing at a conference like Digiday:Mobile or Digiday:Social affects the number of followers a speaker has. @shivsingh provided the keynote for Digiday:Social, “The Social MediaInfluencers: How Brands Become Connectors on the Social Web” which was very well received and I expect he may have picked up quite a few followers as a result.
@StephanieSAM led a panel on making sense of social media data, “Data Here, Data There, Data Everywhere! Making Sense of Social Data“. At one point in the discussion someone brought up a request from a brand about making a viral video. This led to a good discussion on Twitter about how a request to make a viral video is sort of like a request to make a hit TV show. Good content goes viral, but if you set out to make something go viral, it is probably less likely to have good content and go viral.
One person to join in this discussion was @ckieff. I’ve met Chris at many events and he let me know that he is now working on his own at 1 Good Reason. His card describes himself as a ‘Social Marketing Evangalist’. Normally, that would be enough for me to throw the card in the trash. Everyone and their brother on Twitter is a social marketing evangelist. However, Chris really does understand digital marketing strategy, and I encourage people to follow him on Twitter.
After the event, I had a chance to speak to many interesting people. Two that I speak with at many such events are @JasonDPG and @annemai. They are both well worth the follow. I also had a very interesting discussion with @KenRobbins. Ken is the President of Response Mine Interactive, one of the Sammy award winners.
During the conference and the awards ceremony, there were lots of interesting discussions on Twitter. Perhaps the most interesting comment came from @sofadude They observed that Weber Shandwick, one of the finalists for Best Twitter Branding, was a PR firm and not an ad shop. They went on to say that if social media is all about the conversation, then perhaps it is best to let public relations and communications firms handle your brand, as well as noting that this may be more cost efficient. Of course, they managed to communicate the idea in 140 characters.
There were several other people that contributed a lot to the discussion on Twitter about the conference and they deserve a shout out as well: @LizaPost @DragonSearch @fromedome @mmathias @HartHooton @Alirana @tanyachadha @chrisfield
So, whether you attend any of the Digiday events on Thursday, these are some of the people that I considered influencers and I hope you follow them. Of course, I hope you follow me on Twitter as well. I’m @ahynes1. Then, join the discussion and share your Follow Friday favorites and if you attended any of the Digiday events, what you thought the highpoints were.
(Cross posted at DigidayDaily.)
