Written on September 4th, 2008 by 
Graham
Just a very quick note that Entrecard is looking for a weekly columnist to write about enhancing your Blogger/Blogspot blog. You will be required to submit one article per week, it can include a link back to your blog, and you will be paid in Entrecard credits depending on quality (usually 1500 to 2000 credits).
Your blog should use Blogger/Blogspot and be heavily modified and upgraded to prove that you have the necessary experience. Apply in the comment below or send an email to Graham@entrecard.com
Written on September 4th, 2008 by Richard Catto
This is a guest post by Richard Catto of Cape Town news.
When version 2.3 of WordPress was released, the WordPress World got something they had been wanting for for a very long time - tags.
Prior to this watershed release of WordPress, which is still considered the best recent release of WordPress by some, tags were not implemented in the WordPress core code, instead individual bloggers had to rely on third party plugins developed to fill this gap, such as Ultimate Tag Warrior.
Version 2.3 made all these third party tag plugins obsolete. Finally, at last, WordPress had tags built right into the core code! It truly was a huge advance and many WordPressers raced over to download it.
However, before all this happened, many WordPressers (including this one) misused categories as tags, and the number of categories ballooned out of control. SEO plugins also encouraged WordPressers to adopt this bad practice.
Since then I’ve never taken the time to tame my WordPress categories and put them to the use they were originally designed, until now, that is.
So what really is the difference between WordPress categories and tags?
First of all, I’ve read a lot of posts which tackle this subject and still come away scratching my head and not fully comprehending.
Until I got stuck into playing with them directly and setting up a coherent browsing strategy, I never understood the BIG PICTURE that would allow me to just create them on the fly as I blog.
If you’ve never sat down and focussed your attention on just analysing your categories, you have probably missed what I always did.
The fundamental difference between categories and tags is this:
Categories are hierarchical structures whereas tags are flat.
That is the power that categories have that tags will never have. Categories form groups and super groups and super super groups etc., whereas tags just form groups.
If I have a category structure of World->Africa->South Africa->Cape Town and I place a post in the Cape Town sub-sub-sub-category, that post is included not only in Cape Town, but also in the South Africa sub-sub-group, the Africa sub-group and the World group.
Your site readers can use a coherently structured category list to drill down to exactly what they want in ONE CLICK or back up a bit, up the hierarchy, and take in a larger group of posts.
Categories are structured with the most broadly encompassing container at the top and the most specific container at the bottom.
In other words, a person can take in Africa as a whole or zero in on a particular house in a street in a town in a region in a province in a country in Africa. That’s the power and directness of categories.
Categories are not meant to be loosely structured and lying all over the place. They are meant to be tightly organised and logically put together under each other to give you the structure you need.
On the other hand, while categories represent order and logical structure, tags represent anarchy and chaos.
There is no structure or hierarchy to tags. Tags are one long list of attributes, that you assign to posts as they relate to them.
I have heard some bloggers opine that tags should represent keywords that are NOT present in your post. WRONG, oh WRONG WRONG WRONG. No, no, no, no! Don’t do that!
Au contraire, go find the juiciest most important keywords in your posts and tag your posts with those. This will allow people to quickly zero in on exactly those posts where those important concepts are discussed.
To enhance your archive pages which list posts in the various categories or tags, there is a useful WordPress plugin, WP-SNAP!, that will alphabetize your posts and give you a clickable A - Z index at the top of each page.
To conclude this post, I will add that if you make it easy for visitors to browse your site by category or tag, you will retain their readership longer by giving them a more satisfying experience. I hope that this article has gone a long way to clarifying for you the important difference between categories and tags.
Thank you, Graham, for allowing me to guest blog here. 
Written on September 3rd, 2008 by Saphrym
I’ve mentioned this one to other people before. Some people have scoffed at it for their own reasons. As a blog reader, though, I happen to be an extremely huge fan of this plugin:
Subscribe To Comments
So why do I like it so much? Here’s the pros and cons: Read the rest of this entry »
Written on September 2nd, 2008 by Graham
Well, it’s that time of the month (the first week), and ad spots are once again available on the Entrecard Blog and Sitewide Sidebar!
All for the low, low price of $50, you get…
your 125×125 ad displayed for a full month on the blog, the campaign page, the forums, the shop, and more! This is a very targeted way to reach other bloggers, just like you! And it’s also a great way to support our mission to help bloggers succeed.
The spot does have a rotation, so depending on the number of people who purchase an ad, it will either display solid as it will right now if you purchase), or in rotation with no more than 3 other ads. Overall, it is a very good deal and you absolutely get your money’s worth. We offer full statistics tracking on clickthroughs, CPM, and CPC automatically sent to your email.
If you’d like to get some great, extra exposure for your blog this month, and have the $50 to invest, follow THIS LINK to purchase an ad. Thank you!
BONUS:
Starting this month, we will be randomly awarding 10,000 credits to ONE lucky advertiser. You must be an Entrecard member to be eligible for this prize, and your ad must be running on September 28th, which is the day we will be drawing. Anyone who purchases an ad between today and then will have their ad running for the drawing. So what are you waiting for? Buy an ad today!
Written on August 27th, 2008 by Saphrym
So I told you I’d let you know what to do with your 404 pages on Wordpress. Well, today I’ll tell you all about it. The plugin I use is called AskApache Google 404. It takes your 404 pages and makes them much more useful for your readers. Read the rest of this entry »
Written on August 24th, 2008 by Graham
The Blog World Expo is coming up, September 20 and 21 in Vegas. As you may or may not know, Entrecard launched at the first ever Blog World Expo last year. This year, instead of purchasing a booth and exhibiting Entrecard, I’m doing something a whole lot more useful to the blogosphere as a whole. I want to get together a big group of bloggers Entrecarders, check out all the exhibitors together, and have some group discussion on people’s experiences and thoughts about each company. I want to take lots of pictures, lots of notes, and blog about all of our discussions (with lots of photos and links!). I am going to give the Entrecarder’s who show up free T-Shirts (maybe we can all wear them?), and I want to take all the Entrecarders out for the best dinner in Vegas (The Wynn).
If you’re an Entrecarder, and you’re going to be at Blog World, reply to this post as an RSVP -I’ll email you with details from there.
Come to the Blog World Expo and get real with exhibitors
We’re going to ask these companies the tough questions, and we’re going to get the answers. I want to know who out there is really going to help you succeed as a blogger, and who is just going to complicate your life with another sidebar widget, another username/password? Who can I recommend to you all? Who should you avoid? Together, we’re going to get down to the bottom of the real story. As an Entrecard member, your drinks will be on our company card
So who’s with me?
Written on August 23rd, 2008 by Graham
The Blog Startup project is a project in which I, Graham Langdon (founder of Entrecard -for those that don’t know) walk you through the process of optimizing a blog, and an experiment to see how big a blog can get promoting it with Entrecard only.
A little bit about Optimization
Perhaps the most important aspect of a blog is your comments. When I receive comments on a blog, it makes me feel warm inside. The feeling is natural for bloggers, as I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about and feel the same way. It’s the feeling of validation, that people are reading what you write and that you’re contributing to the massive worldwide dsicussion in the blogosphere in a meaningful way.
But have you ever stopped to think about how you can optimize your blog’s comments? If the Affiliate Marketing industry has taught the blogosphere anything, it is that optimization is an incredibly powerful tool. Any affiliate marketer will tell you that by changing a color, or a placement, or a single word, an entire campaign can go from losing money to making thousands of dollars per day.
What we’re doing here is applying the same logic to blogging. Can changing a single color, or a word, or placement of a link impact the amount of people who comment? Can it influence the visitor to read another article, or subscribe? Almost certainly. Sadly, few ever take the time to properly optimize their blog.
Read the rest of this entry »
Written on August 22nd, 2008 by phirate
Please note there will be an outage at 4AM Boston time (click for more timezones), lasting 2 hours, for performance work and some bug fixes on the site. During this time, widgets and ads will continue to display, however you will not be able to drop cards or use the main site. The toolbar search and lookup functions will not operate during this outage.
Edit: Outage complete, thanks everyone.
Written on August 20th, 2008 by Graham
This is the second installment of the Startup Blog Project. For those of you who are just tuning in, the startup blog project is a project in which I, Graham Langdon, founder of Entrecard, start a new blog from scratch, and use only Entrecard to actively promote it. The goal for me is to show you the most effective ways to use Entrecard, proper ways to optimize your blog (which has nothing to do with Entrecard), and other various strategies. Ultimately, I’d like to prove that a blog can grow to be quite large using Entrecard alone. Because I do not want to skew the results, I will not be linking to the startup blog any more, (though many of you already know what it is).
Optimization Period 1
The traffic results are in. In the first three days (remember, we’re optimizing in 3-day opt. periods), we did 2000 visits, 3400 pageviews, and 16 comments.
Here are the analyics for the first three days, or Opt. Period 1
Here are the traffic sources:
The Stumble Effect:
Right off the bat, you’ll notice that stumble brought me 1,566 visits. When I launched this project, many of you claimed that a single link on the Entrecard blog would bring thousands of hits. It didn’t. As you can see, in this period, I recieved only 131 hits from entrecard.com, and this includes hits from the Entrecard site, my directory listing, people visiting me from their Inbox, etc.
How to achieve the stumble effect
People can sit in their armchairs and claim that fanboys will stumble anything I write. They are wrong. If I wrote an article about how tasty hot dogs are, or about my favorite type of brick, no one would have stumbled. People stumbled for the following reasons:
- I chose an emotionally-charged subject matter that many people have had a life experience with (cancer)
- I provided little-known information about a potential risk that nearly everyone is exposed to (non-stick cookware)
Entrecard and the stumble effect
The simple fact of the matter is that Entrecard puts your blog in front of people. Period. Not many (any?) other services can guarantee this. So when you combine the guaranteed visibility with an emotionally charged subject matter, and good information that people probably haven’t heard before, you set yourself up to leverage social-sharing sites like stumble. This goes back to the essential Entrecard axiom: Entrecard will only be as good to you as you are to your blog. Great blogs will kick ass with Entrecard. Poor blogs will flounder. That’s ok, because we’re all here to learn how to make our blogs rock.
Sociable Plugin
I have the Sociable plugin installed on my startup blog. As you can see to the right, this provides chicklets for all the social sharing sites, right at the end of the post. I have no doubt in my mind that it is because of this plugin alone that so many people stumbled my first post. You too can leverage social giants like stumble, but you have to make it dead simple for your readers.
Dropping Strategy
I told myself that I would drop 100 cards per day to get a metered dose of traffic with which to optimize my blog. Well, I didn’t quite hit that target. I did 70, 20, and 50 drops.
Because my blog is about cancer prevention, I dropped exclusively in the Health and Medecine category. Sorry droppers, I didn’t drop a single card on my inbox. I used the EntreBar to drop easily. 
What I did was used the double-arrow button to open ten windows at a time. On average, I commented once or twice for every ten windows I opened. That is about 17 comments.
I have no doubt in my mind that the comments I made encouraged bloggers to visit my site. And because I was dropping and commenting in my niche, which is an incredibly powerful strategy, the people visiting my were incredibly targeted, and thus they all stumbled my site.
Drop Backs
I received 25, 44, 37 drops on my site respectively. This data laughs in the face of everyone who claimed that my study would be incredibly skewed, as thousands of Entrecarders visited my new blog. My widget placement is TOP-RIGHT so I have every reason to believe that every Entrecarder who visited my site dropped a card, meaning only 100 Entrecarders visited my site in Opt. Period 1.
Those droppers were targeted visitors from the Health and Medicine channel, they liked what they saw, and they stumbled.
Outside visitors from Entrecard?
One criticism of Entrecard is that it only brings you a closed-loop of traffic. “Oh really?” I say, as I point to a chart that shows 2000 unique visitors, out of which only 100 were Entrecarders.
Comments and comment Ratio
Out of 2000 visits, I received 16 comments. To get your comment ratio, you divide the number of comments by the number of visits, or 16/2000 which equals .008. This means that for ever 1000 visitors, I get 8 comments. Now, this was only for the first three days, but I want to improve this. I really want to hit .05 before optimizing anything else.
Optimizing your comment ratio
I want to increase my comment ratio 5x over, and I have no clue how to do it. That is the beauty of optimization. Over short periods of time (in this case three day periods), you test, test, test, one change at a time, and see what sticks. You change colors, change placements, and get a little creative. It is important to only change ONE element when optimizing, so that you know whether it had an impact or not. In other words, if I changed the “comment” button, added SezWho, and put a big image in the sidebar that says “DID YOU COMMENT?” and my comment ratio shot up, I would have no clue what was responsible.
For the second optimization period, I installed SezWho. That’s it. One simple change. If it increases my comment ratio, I will continue using it, and test a change to something else. If it decreases my comment ratio, I will take it off the blog. That’s how optimization works, in a nutshell. I’ll give you the update on SezWho and how it performs in three days.
Proper Control
Because this is a scientific experiment, proper control is absolutely necessary. That means I will drop exactly the same number of cards, on exactly the same category of people. It means I will publish a new post at the beggining of each three day optimization period, and make it equally controversial and emotionally charged. This means that for optimizing comments, I am focusing on posts about potentially risky toxins that everyone is exposed to in their every day life. For those of you who have seen the latest post, you will notice that it is longer than my last one. I wanted it to be the exact same length, but I got so into it that it became longer. I will try to have better control over this in the future, because I do believe that post length influences comment ratio. Anyone who has taken a science-lab course knows that identifying potential bias in the results, and admitting them, is key to the process. So there you go
What do you think?
How should I go about optimizing the comment ratio? Let me know your thoughts and ideas here, and I will try some of them out over the next month or two, as I strive to get that .05 comment ratio!
Written on August 20th, 2008 by Saphrym
Guess what? Remember that post that Graham wrote yesterday about Yahoo Buzz? (If not, you should read it.) Well, there’s a Wordpress Plugin already created for it. It was written by Travis Johnson and is called WPBuzz.
There are probably many more out there, but this is the one I found and have tested to see if it works properly.
Don’t worry, I’ll get back to those 404 pages next week. But this week I thought this one made more sense. Now Yahoo Buzz does promote content to the home page of Yahoo, but it has to be in a niche that people are searching for. So, blogs that get a lot of search engine traffic, or are gearing themselves towards search engine traffic, will do better with this than others.
