As I mentioned in a post last month, I joined the EntreCard Network. For those that are not familiar with EntreCard, read this post first: http://tycoonblogger.com/2009/03/19/promoting-your-blog/promote-your-blog-using-entrecard
If you are still reading this you probably have a basic understanding of what the network is all about. Just when I was getting used to things, a couple of weeks ago they announced some radical chances to their business model. They announced that they would be selling ad space on the widgets of blogs in their network 50% of the time. This outraged a lot of loyal bloggers, to me I am too new to care one way or the other. I see this as a potential positive in that members will be able to cash out their credits and make real money instead of “EC” money.
After 3 weeks on the network, I have noticed a slight increase in visitors and as I expected an increase in my bounce rate as well. Yesterday, I decided that I was going to join the marketplace and start earning some credits so I can advertise on the major blogs and even the EC blog too. It took my almost an hour to get things started but I figured out how to offer services to the market place. I have two service offerings right now, one involves RSS and the other involves selling blogroll links on another PR4 blog that I own. The response has been much greater than I expected. In the first 24 hours, I completed 9 transactions and earned over 10,000 EC credits. I do not know the exact worth of that because I have been unable to find out any information about the conversion rate that will happen when they start selling outside ads. I do know that EntreCard sells 10,000 credits for $56. I will be happy if I can continue to earn over 10,000 credits for a couple of hours of easy work. I know a lot of people left the network and there is a mass exodus happening right now. I have decided to stick around and see how things go. I have been happy with them so far.
Many readers have come to me to ask if they should use blogger.com, today.com or other online blog or web hosting sites and I tell all my friends and fellow bloggers the same thing. Decide what you want to accomplish with your blog and you will know the best way to proceed.
If you are looking to make some ad revenue or perhaps even get a few paid assignments for your blog, then it is worth spending the money and investing in a self hosted wordpress blog. This is because many advertisers do not want to pay to advertise on blogs with free domain hosting , and some sites such as Today.com prohibit using advertising networks or hosting advertising ads on your blog posts.
If you just want to share information, photos for the world as a hobby with no serious intention to monetize or market your blog, then you are perfectly fine using Blogger, Xanga or any other blog. Today.com even offers some payment for blog posts, but considers all blog posts their property, so you cannot repost material elsewhere or even take your posts with you should you want to convert to a wordpress blog later.
When you won your own wordpress blog you have complete control over content, advertising and can choose which programs and advertisers you wish to work with and when. When you leave your blog hosted to some other site, you always give up your complete creative control and are restricted to whatever the terms are from the site hosting your blog, or you might not stand out for advertisers since hosted sites carry more weight since bloggers paying for the own domains are likely to be more serious about keeping the site running and content updated regularly.
If you have been blogging seriously for a number of years, chances are you are part of or thought about joining up with a blog network. I have been thinking about this as well, this particular site is relatively new, but I have several more established blogs that I own. There are hundreds of blog networks out there, some big, some small, some good, and some bad. After looking into a variety of options, I have come to the conclusion that the majority of these networks care more about the networks then the bloggers. It seems like the bloggers are just a commodity that is built into the equation. This is understandable as blog networks have turned into multi-million dollar enterprises. Networks like Gawker, Weblogs, and b5 Media dominate the space and have turned blogging into a well oiled machine. I am not sure if this is good or bad for blogging, but I think it is bad for an independent blogger who does not want to sell out to the bug guys. Most bloggers that I know got into blogging as a way to get out of the corporate world. The last thing I would want to do is answer to somebody else. I much rather blog on my own schedule and do what I want when I want. I realize that for a blog to be successful, the blog owner much reach out to the blog-o-sphere and network and collaborate with other bloggers. What is there was an informal type of blog network, where you get the benefit of joining a community of likeminded people and you share ideas. From time to time you guest post on another member’s blogs, you join their blog community and add useful comments. You subscribe to each other’s RSS feeds and add each other to favorite lists on Technorati and “Digg” their stories and they “Digg” yours. This is the kind of network I am looking to join. The only problem is I have not been able to find one like that. That is why I decided to start my own. I am starting the BlogFluence Network, and TycoonBlogger.com is a founding blog of this burgeoning network. Seriously, I am starting a blog network. This is not going to be a corporate endeavor, I am basically looking to partner up with a dozen or so serious bloggers who want to work together to promote our blogs. If you are interested and want to discuss this idea further, drop me an email at djk370 (at) gmail.com.
My traffic is starting to pick up and readers are spending more time on my blog, I guess that makes sense since I now have more content then last month. I felt it was a great time to set up my Feedburner account and start engaging my readers. Since a lot of new bloggers read my blog, I want to start with the basics of RSS and Feedburner.
What is RSS? RSS stands for really simple syndication. Basically, it allows readers to click a button to subscribe to your blog and have daily updates sent to them and whatever form they want. I use Google reader and I suspect that most people do as well. There are a couple major reasons why bloggers want to boost their RSS readership. First off, it helps transform your blog into a community and helps take you to the next level. Second, it is a great measure of how popular your blog is.
The most popular service is FeedBurner, which is a Google company. It is simple to sign up, just go to feedburner.com and type your url in the field and they will burn your feed and get your account set up. At this point, your feed will funnel through Feedburner. This will make it easy to get a feel for your subscriber base and also provide a nice metric to monitor the growth and maturation of your blog.
When you sign up, you will want to make sure you grad the code to display an image on your blog to promote your feed and encourage people to sign up. You may have noticed that other bloggers have the total amount of subscribers listed net to their icon. I strong encourage you to do this, but I would wait until your subscriber numbers are at least over 100. There are different schools of thought about this, but I will not be displaying this until I get past the 100 mark. There is a psychological element to this, people want to gravitate toward things that are popular (think Twitter and Facebook) and being popular helps create a snowball effect. It is kind of like the analogy, “It takes money to make money.” Well, I think the same is true in regards to subscribers, the more you have the easier it is to get more. In my experiences, the first 10 are the toughest. With that being said, why don’t you help my cause and subscribe to my feed. J
I wrote a similar article last month but so much has changed that I felt compelled to write an updated list. I was working on submitting my Green Jobs blog to free blog directories yesterday and the top 10 list that I use changed dramatically. I am eliminating 5 directories and adding 5 new ones. Here are the ones I am taking off the list and the reason why:
Here is the new and improved “Top 10 Free Blog Directories” list:
My blog directory, Submit My Blog did not make the top 10 list because it is too new and has a PR0 at this time. It has become obvious to me that I will have to keep an eye on these blog directories and update this list often. Take a minute and grab my RSS feed to stay updated on the latest changes.
