Something incredible has arrived!
I just became a shareholder in Me2everyone and I never had to pay a single penny for the shares! It can only be described as the gold-rush for 2009. This company is going to be huge and shares will soar in value over the coming months! You can register for free and it never has to cost you a single penny!
Me2everyone is going to be a cool new virtual world where you can meet friends, chat, shop, play, watch videos, create an art gallery, open a virtual newspaper, play the free inworld lottery and make money from your own online store!
You and everyone you know make the decisions, shape the world, create real incomes and share in the profits. It’s a new place where you meet new people or invite your friends. Learn new skills or expand your business. Find the love of your life or help the planet.
Membership is free and every member automatically becomes a shareholder in me2everyone Limited. Personally I have 2500 shares in the venture and I'm going to increase my shares very soon. Plus, I get extra shares when YOU register with me and you will get extra when you sign up YOUR friends.
The T&C changes for the share opening offer so do this today January 11th if you can. I'll update this post when the T&C change. This is an excellent chance for all of us to make some real progress in 2009 and beyond!
Please don't miss it.If you are looking for something really good in 2009: something that changes your view on the world, then you really have to spend just one minute and look at this website.
http://www.me2everyone.com/8741
Sunday 11 January 2009
Tuesday 6 January 2009
Link and Drop Luvvies
I've been very remiss about doing this before, but it really is time that I said thanks to those people who regularly drop on my entrecard, visit all my blogs via Adgitize and give me link love in other ways.
I'm saying thanks here on behalf of all of my blogs (even those Entrecard doesn't like - sticks out tongue) so if you are wondering why you're here when you've only visited the others - now you know. The list is in the sidebar if you haven't seen my other blogging efforts.
Broadly speaking, those who Adgitize have Entrecard, although not necessarily vice versa. These are the names I see most frequently when I analyse who has visited and who I am pretty sure stays around longer than the 5 seconds it takes to find the widget and record your visit.
In no particular order.....
Greg Matthews likes to rant
Raging Rev
Orient Lodge
Girls Business
Bring Home the Dollars
Adsense Addict
Fire and Glass
Emm In London
Qiwoman's Click Corner
Annie's Savvy Cafe
A Redhead Ranting
A Second Cup
....and lots, lots more - you really are appreciated and more so if you comment, so I can improve and write stuff you will like.
What was particularly satisfying is the number who visited my new foodie blog For the Love of British Food on Today.com when I launched it recently. I reviewed Today.com as a blogging platform a few days ago.
Apart from my BIG Entrecard whinges, I had a little one in their forum. I keep getting ad requests from people who haven't even checked out my content and dropped - I've stopped approving them and they get a rejection and little 'love note' to say drop first then ask again. Tell me what you think.
I'm saying thanks here on behalf of all of my blogs (even those Entrecard doesn't like - sticks out tongue
Broadly speaking, those who Adgitize have Entrecard, although not necessarily vice versa. These are the names I see most frequently when I analyse who has visited and who I am pretty sure stays around longer than the 5 seconds it takes to find the widget and record your visit.
In no particular order.....
Greg Matthews likes to rant
Raging Rev
Orient Lodge
Girls Business
Bring Home the Dollars
Adsense Addict
Fire and Glass
Emm In London
Qiwoman's Click Corner
Annie's Savvy Cafe
A Redhead Ranting
A Second Cup
....and lots, lots more - you really are appreciated and more so if you comment, so I can improve and write stuff you will like.
What was particularly satisfying is the number who visited my new foodie blog For the Love of British Food on Today.com when I launched it recently. I reviewed Today.com as a blogging platform a few days ago.
Apart from my BIG Entrecard whinges, I had a little one in their forum. I keep getting ad requests from people who haven't even checked out my content and dropped - I've stopped approving them and they get a rejection and little 'love note' to say drop first then ask again. Tell me what you think.
Sunday 4 January 2009
Watch out for the Entrecard style police in 2009
This is a follow-up to my earlier post about one of my blogs that was removed from the Entrecard system. Following an acrimonious dialogue in the Entrecard forum, they now say that they plan to 'clarify' their quality rules and remove large numbers of blogs that don't meet their standards and I am just the tip of the iceberg apparently.
What they say in their reply is that they are so overworked and understaffed that they don't have the resources to review every blog as soon as it is added, and that new blogs cannot regard themselves as 'accepted' just because they aren't immediately explicitly rejected and removed (and are still there after 6 weeks).
I would warn all Entrecard users that promote any affiliate links of any kind in their blog to watch their step. What I considered to be informational links - because they were not directly promoting my PERSONAL affiliate link - were still regarded by admin as being 'paid posts'.
No Entrecard user is safe now. If you don't keep a watch on any new rules and measure them against your blog, you could have your entire account removed overnight by their style police and don't bother appealing, it isn't just worth the stress and aggravation.
As users of the system, everyone needs to say once and for all that provided a blog meets the basic commonsense guidelines that everyone would want and expect, any further definition of quality opinions should not be driven by Entrecard's admin. but by the community.
The ideal situation is that some blogs might get visited and dropped on by the compulsive droppers but anything that the Entrecard community don't like or can't be bothered with, won't get the kind of quality traffic that stays, reads and follows.
I have some suggestions for Entrecard. Make every blogger pay just a few dollars for every blog they have on the system. Not as a monthly subscription, just when you join or add a blog to your list. It might deter some we don't really want in the system anyway and pay for them to take on some competent and technically qualified staff who aren't totally up their own ****.
Secondly, put any new definitions and guidelines in front of the community and let them decide whether the changes are needed. Whose community is it after all?
Let the community decide democratically whether the entire category of online moneymaking should disappear because according to how I've been treated, most of the blogs in there would be for the chop. My thread is now closed, but if you object to what has happened to me and the proposals, go to the forum and start a new one - now - today.
Thirdly, dramatically reduce the total number of drops you can do from each account per day. This will deter the people who ONLY drop for ec to buy advertising for themselves, build automated systems to help their excessive drop habit, and have no interest whatever in reading your content. Allowing 300 drops per day from each blog does not encourage the creation of quality content - you can't be spending time thinking and writing if you are just surfing from blog to blog and never even stopping to read a headline!
Now - an example of the most astounding hypocrisy from Entrecard! If you have a VIP blog and post on Today.com, you receive $1 for each post (1 per day) and every view to your page is paid for. Entrecard users are allowed to join Today.com. Today.com bloggers can carry an Entrecard widget although other kinds of advertising widgets are not permitted. Even more hypocritical is the fact that Entrecard actually carry advertising for Today.com on their front page!
And, incredibly after all my efforts to get an answer, no-one at Entrecard was able to supply one to the original question - did a 'sticky post' with a date in the future draw the blog to their attention in the first place. They say they can't be expected to be experts in every blogging platform - I'm not asking them to be, it's their own system I'm enquiring about! They should be expected to know about that, shouldn't they? Hmm.
What they say in their reply is that they are so overworked and understaffed that they don't have the resources to review every blog as soon as it is added, and that new blogs cannot regard themselves as 'accepted' just because they aren't immediately explicitly rejected and removed (and are still there after 6 weeks).
I would warn all Entrecard users that promote any affiliate links of any kind in their blog to watch their step. What I considered to be informational links - because they were not directly promoting my PERSONAL affiliate link - were still regarded by admin as being 'paid posts'.
No Entrecard user is safe now. If you don't keep a watch on any new rules and measure them against your blog, you could have your entire account removed overnight by their style police and don't bother appealing, it isn't just worth the stress and aggravation.
As users of the system, everyone needs to say once and for all that provided a blog meets the basic commonsense guidelines that everyone would want and expect, any further definition of quality opinions should not be driven by Entrecard's admin. but by the community.
The ideal situation is that some blogs might get visited and dropped on by the compulsive droppers but anything that the Entrecard community don't like or can't be bothered with, won't get the kind of quality traffic that stays, reads and follows.
I have some suggestions for Entrecard. Make every blogger pay just a few dollars for every blog they have on the system. Not as a monthly subscription, just when you join or add a blog to your list. It might deter some we don't really want in the system anyway and pay for them to take on some competent and technically qualified staff who aren't totally up their own ****.
Secondly, put any new definitions and guidelines in front of the community and let them decide whether the changes are needed. Whose community is it after all?
Let the community decide democratically whether the entire category of online moneymaking should disappear because according to how I've been treated, most of the blogs in there would be for the chop. My thread is now closed, but if you object to what has happened to me and the proposals, go to the forum and start a new one - now - today.
Thirdly, dramatically reduce the total number of drops you can do from each account per day. This will deter the people who ONLY drop for ec to buy advertising for themselves, build automated systems to help their excessive drop habit, and have no interest whatever in reading your content. Allowing 300 drops per day from each blog does not encourage the creation of quality content - you can't be spending time thinking and writing if you are just surfing from blog to blog and never even stopping to read a headline!
Now - an example of the most astounding hypocrisy from Entrecard! If you have a VIP blog and post on Today.com, you receive $1 for each post (1 per day) and every view to your page is paid for. Entrecard users are allowed to join Today.com. Today.com bloggers can carry an Entrecard widget although other kinds of advertising widgets are not permitted. Even more hypocritical is the fact that Entrecard actually carry advertising for Today.com on their front page!
And, incredibly after all my efforts to get an answer, no-one at Entrecard was able to supply one to the original question - did a 'sticky post' with a date in the future draw the blog to their attention in the first place. They say they can't be expected to be experts in every blogging platform - I'm not asking them to be, it's their own system I'm enquiring about! They should be expected to know about that, shouldn't they? Hmm.
Saturday 3 January 2009
Every post pays me
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned another blog I run on Today.com, called For the Love of British Food.
I've been doing some hard thinking about how I'm going to maximise my blogging profits in the coming year, and this blog will definitely be a key part so here's a review of what it's like to run a blog in this location.
The most attractive part of the deal is being paid for 1 post per day and every unique view in a month. You don't get a lot for the views, but you get $1 per post and a whacking $5 for referring a new blogger to Today.com. Looking a little deeper into the rules for referrals, the new blog will need to meet some fairly stringent conditions, such as having 10 posts within a 3 month period - even more than Entrecard! There are some very generous monthly bonuses for referring large numbers of new blogs, but the target of a minimum 300 is unrealistic and I'd be surprised if they'd ever have to pay out on this.
You don't earn through your own Adsense account, but Today.com claim they share Adsense click revenue with you. I can't find anywhere in my earnings stats that specifically identifies what I earned this way though.
One thing they really do need to work on is the user interface. There are two different account/blog control areas and they are only linked one way. The menu you get to when you login has a further link to your blog control panel and once you are there you can't get BACK to the login menu, so I recommend opening in a new tab or window. The login menu untidy and ragged in appearance too.
Help is a bit sketchy. There is a Help 'wiki', but a lot of topics don't have anything in them. However the forum is a good source of information and there is a very helpful user blog called 'The Answerman'. I'm planning to do some investigation to see if Today.com users can help build the help wiki.
You won't be able to use as full a range of moneymaking and traffic-gathering widgets as you can on Blogger or other platforms, and the guidelines for what you can and cannot use are in the forum in a sticky post. Entrecard is apparently OK, but Adgitize is not allowed as a widget which is rather disappointing. However, Adgitize does NOT require you to carry an advertising widget on all blogs in your account, so although this rule may change in the future, I will be adding my For the Love of British Food blog to my account.
Creating widgets is a little confusing and not very elegant. There isn't a specific HTML/Java widget, you need to use the text one. To set up a feed link you can either use the Meta widget or find a suitable image and create your own in a text link. Some of the themes already include feed icons. The widget list optimistically says 'Tag Cloud', but it's just a plain old list. You can move your widgets around in the sidebars the same way you can here in Blogger.
There are a reasonable range of attractive themes and templates available including 2 and 3 column options, and on a number of them you can customize and replace the header image with one of your own, which I did.
I frequently prepare my blog posts in Word so I can spell and grammar check beforehand, but it seems that there are conflicts when you paste into the Today.com editor, and line and paragraph breaks can get corrupted. A forum post recommends doing all your checking, then pasting it as plain text. A bit annoying as you then lose all your hyperlinks and have to re-add. If you are good at HTML, it may be quicker to take the risk that you'll get some odd formatting after pasting from Word, and fix it in the HTML editor view.
Finally, the payment lowdown. You have to reach a minimum of $50 to get paid at all, so daily bloggers with a very high readership and a referral or two might hit the target in a month, two months is more realistic.
You can only have one 'VIP' blog qualifying for the paid programme, you can't REFER someone else in your household, but it says nothing about spouses, partners, housemates etc having a NON-referred account, provided they have their own Paypal account or a bank account to pay a cheque into. Presumably the cheques are issued from a US bank in $.
I'd recommend it with the above warnings, but do make sure you are aware of all the exclusions and restrictions or you could end up frustrated and annoyed that the only way you can actually earn and monetize your blog is through Today.com themselves.
I've been doing some hard thinking about how I'm going to maximise my blogging profits in the coming year, and this blog will definitely be a key part so here's a review of what it's like to run a blog in this location.
The most attractive part of the deal is being paid for 1 post per day and every unique view in a month. You don't get a lot for the views, but you get $1 per post and a whacking $5 for referring a new blogger to Today.com. Looking a little deeper into the rules for referrals, the new blog will need to meet some fairly stringent conditions, such as having 10 posts within a 3 month period - even more than Entrecard! There are some very generous monthly bonuses for referring large numbers of new blogs, but the target of a minimum 300 is unrealistic and I'd be surprised if they'd ever have to pay out on this.
You don't earn through your own Adsense account, but Today.com claim they share Adsense click revenue with you. I can't find anywhere in my earnings stats that specifically identifies what I earned this way though.
One thing they really do need to work on is the user interface. There are two different account/blog control areas and they are only linked one way. The menu you get to when you login has a further link to your blog control panel and once you are there you can't get BACK to the login menu, so I recommend opening in a new tab or window. The login menu untidy and ragged in appearance too.
Help is a bit sketchy. There is a Help 'wiki', but a lot of topics don't have anything in them. However the forum is a good source of information and there is a very helpful user blog called 'The Answerman'. I'm planning to do some investigation to see if Today.com users can help build the help wiki.
You won't be able to use as full a range of moneymaking and traffic-gathering widgets as you can on Blogger or other platforms, and the guidelines for what you can and cannot use are in the forum in a sticky post. Entrecard is apparently OK, but Adgitize is not allowed as a widget which is rather disappointing. However, Adgitize does NOT require you to carry an advertising widget on all blogs in your account, so although this rule may change in the future, I will be adding my For the Love of British Food blog to my account.
Creating widgets is a little confusing and not very elegant. There isn't a specific HTML/Java widget, you need to use the text one. To set up a feed link you can either use the Meta widget or find a suitable image and create your own in a text link. Some of the themes already include feed icons. The widget list optimistically says 'Tag Cloud', but it's just a plain old list. You can move your widgets around in the sidebars the same way you can here in Blogger.
There are a reasonable range of attractive themes and templates available including 2 and 3 column options, and on a number of them you can customize and replace the header image with one of your own, which I did.
I frequently prepare my blog posts in Word so I can spell and grammar check beforehand, but it seems that there are conflicts when you paste into the Today.com editor, and line and paragraph breaks can get corrupted. A forum post recommends doing all your checking, then pasting it as plain text. A bit annoying as you then lose all your hyperlinks and have to re-add. If you are good at HTML, it may be quicker to take the risk that you'll get some odd formatting after pasting from Word, and fix it in the HTML editor view.
Finally, the payment lowdown. You have to reach a minimum of $50 to get paid at all, so daily bloggers with a very high readership and a referral or two might hit the target in a month, two months is more realistic.
You can only have one 'VIP' blog qualifying for the paid programme, you can't REFER someone else in your household, but it says nothing about spouses, partners, housemates etc having a NON-referred account, provided they have their own Paypal account or a bank account to pay a cheque into. Presumably the cheques are issued from a US bank in $.
I'd recommend it with the above warnings, but do make sure you are aware of all the exclusions and restrictions or you could end up frustrated and annoyed that the only way you can actually earn and monetize your blog is through Today.com themselves.
Friday 2 January 2009
Site Review - Marketing Opinions
Have been catching up with my Entrecard and Adgitize dropping and clicking today and came across Marketing Opinions .
I have seen some of the techniques for making the most of Adsense and other SEO topics scattered across half a dozen different blogs, but this has a lot of info in one place which is handy for anyone just starting out as a paid blogger.
As well as being a good reference, it has a nice layout, good choice of fonts and invites comments and enquiries giving a direct email address.
Just a couple of minor gripes - I couldn't find a profile of the author - it is always good to know the credentials of those giving advice. Also, there are places where the grammar is bad or the words don't make sense at all. This is irritating and so unnecessary. If you are not 100% confident about your spelling and grammar, compose offline in Word or similar and use all the checking tools.
The blog also lists tools and moneymaking sites that you will find useful, such as the backlink checker, DoFollow Blog finder and the paid survey directory (you DON'T have to pay to get the info and it's good - I use several of the sites in the UK section myself) but some of the 'links' in the tools list did not go to the sites indicated, one ending up on a rather sleazy chat site.
If I was scoring this site, I'd probably give it 8/10. Not perfect, but a good addition to my list of blogs to follow.
I have seen some of the techniques for making the most of Adsense and other SEO topics scattered across half a dozen different blogs, but this has a lot of info in one place which is handy for anyone just starting out as a paid blogger.
As well as being a good reference, it has a nice layout, good choice of fonts and invites comments and enquiries giving a direct email address.
Just a couple of minor gripes - I couldn't find a profile of the author - it is always good to know the credentials of those giving advice. Also, there are places where the grammar is bad or the words don't make sense at all. This is irritating and so unnecessary. If you are not 100% confident about your spelling and grammar, compose offline in Word or similar and use all the checking tools.
The blog also lists tools and moneymaking sites that you will find useful, such as the backlink checker, DoFollow Blog finder and the paid survey directory (you DON'T have to pay to get the info and it's good - I use several of the sites in the UK section myself) but some of the 'links' in the tools list did not go to the sites indicated, one ending up on a rather sleazy chat site.
If I was scoring this site, I'd probably give it 8/10. Not perfect, but a good addition to my list of blogs to follow.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)