Written on January 3rd, 2009 by 
Graham
Greetings Entrecarders!
With our recent move to up transfer limits to 25,000 credits per week, we’ve gotten lots of reports from happy Entrecarders who are holding do-it-yourself contests once again. These contests, where Entrecard Credits are given away as prizes, are a great way to increaes your traffic.
How to hold a contest
Step 1: The Prizes
The first step to holding a contest is deciding what you’re going to give away. Do you have a few thousand credits you’re going to offer up as a prize? Are you going to put in the extra effort, and get other people on board and offering up prizes as well? What will you offer the other prize-poolers to make it worth their while? A link back to their blog is a great way to reward them for offering prizes in your contest.
Step 2: How to enter?
Determining how readers will enter your contest is something you should do carefully, and tailor it to meet your own goals. Will you give out one contest entry for each person who leaves a comment? Will you give out extra entries for people who write a blog post about your contest? A google search for “Entrecard Contest” will give you lots of ideas of things other people have done before. Be creative and enthusiastic in your blog post about your contest.
Step 3: Paying the winners
Once the contest is over and the winners have been selected, it’s time to pay them. Make sure to send all other people contributing to your prize pool the profile links of the winners.
All Entrecard Credits are transferred from the profile. So, on anyone’s Entrecard Profile (which you can always get to by clicking the Entrecard logo on their widget on their blog) you will see these options on the side:
Simple click the 4th option down from the top, “Give credits to this site” to transfer the winning credits!
That’s it. Enjoy! Don’t forget to promote your Entrecard contest on Twitter!
Written on January 1st, 2009 by Graham
There is no better time than today, January 1st, to flesh out your plan to take your blog to the next level this year. As anyone who knows me is well aware, I stress comments second only to great content as the path to success for your blog.
Comments are the life-blood of your blog and the best way to send out a line to any other blogger. But how much thought have you put into what comments you will approve, and what comments you will reject? How do you respond to your comments? What are your goals while leaving comments?
Now I know this idea has been proposed plenty of times, but I want to urge you all to reflect on one simple concept when it comes to comments: Advancing the discussion. So many comments amount to little more than “thanks for the great info” or “I agree” or “wonderful tip, I’ll have to try that”. Essentially, these comments do nothing more than stick a small sign in the ground that says “I was here” and a link back to your blog. That’s all well and great, but if you’re trying to comment as a strategy to draw traffic, you know know that no one is going to have any interest in the link back to your blog unless you’re saying something interesting.
So here are some rules that I’ve borrowed from this article on Venture Hacks, which was summing up this article by Edward Tufte.
First, the rules call for only approving comments that advance the quality of discussion in a civil manner. The focus should be placed on the quality of discussion for the reader. This rule also states that simply agreeing or disagreeing with a post is irrelevant and should not be approved.
Second, the rules call for correcting basic spelling and grammar.
Third, the rules call for comment quality setting the precedent and standard for all future posts.
Fourth, the rules call for not approving comments that are borderline acceptable, if their overall effect lowers the quality of the discussion.
Fifth, the rules call for deleting comments in the future if you are looking back over a post and determine that a certain comment did not advance the discussion.
Sixth, the rules call for thanking commenters and highlighting good comments.
All of this is based on advancing the discussion
In case you haven’t figured it out, this entire comment strategy is based on advancing the discussion. The problem is, for many small bloggers, they may not be getting any comments at all that truly advance the discussion. The strategy doesn’t do much to recommend how to get the first few quality commenters. I submit that you could specifically solicit for quality comments from other bloggers in your niche.
But the bottom line is that this is a strategy to build a more sophisticated blog, and it will require a more sophisticated audience who has a genuine interest in good discourse. If done right, this strategy would attract more sophisticated readers in turn to comment and participate. But a sophisticated blog may or may not be your goal.
Sophistication is a great niche in the blogosphere
So why go through all the trouble to keep the level of dicussion in your comments sophisticated? Why go through all the trouble to leave sophisticated comments on other’s blogs? I mean, after all, leaving sophisticated comments requires a lot of time, energy, and thought.
The answer is simple. You will stand out. Sophistication is a niche in the blogosphere. Many people are craving a sophiticated level of discource and exchange, and are left wondering where to find it. Many bloggers wished that the quality of the comments they received would be higher. So, by playing by these rules, both when leaving comments for others and approving comments on your own blog, you set your personal standard and personal “brand” in the blogosphere as one of sophistication. People craving sophistication will start flocking to your blog to hear what you have to say, and will pay special attention to your comments.
Here at Entrecard, anyone is welcome to comment. We won’t be deleting people’s comments that don’t “advance the discussion.” However, if you are a blogger looking to tap into a very powerful niche, I would suggest you consider going the high road as outlined above. It will certainly make you stand out in a blogosphere that is seeing increasing saturation and competition.
What do you think about these rules?
Written on December 19th, 2008 by Graham
Hi Everyone
As most of you will know, we are currently in an endless battle trying to fight of all the spammers and SPLOGs from joining up in the community. So we are looking to bring on board some more voluntary moderators. As the community has been growing there has been a need for some time to do this and we will be doing it in a more formal manner than previously.
The tasks of the voluntary moderators will be:
1. Monitor the incoming blogs and approve or remove
2. Monitor the ToS reports and action these as necessary
3. Follow up on Warnings that have been issued to sites and take futher action where required
4. Monitor the forums for any spam, and provide assistance in the Support section where needed
5. Escalate any issues to Graham, Phirate or Myself that require additional discussion or involvement
6. Any other tasks that come up.
Of course as this a voluntary role we are well aware that you will never be able to get all of this done each day, and this is why we need to bring on board around 5 new moderators. This will help distribute the load between all moderators and staff and ensure that no-one gets burnt out.
What we are looking for:
* People who are passionate about blogging and passionate about Entrecard
* People who have 3 hours a week (minimum/on average) to spare. Ideally this will be spread out evenly across the week but we are flexible with this too (you are after all volunteering).
* People who know the ToS and Entrecard Quality Guidelines Well (you can see these here –> http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=blog_quality_standards)
* People with previous moderator/customer service experience would be greatly welcomed (but of course this is in *no way a requirement*)
How to apply:
We have decided with this round to go with a formal application procedure. In order to apply to be a moderator you will need to log a support ticket at http://support.commentedmedia.com (to the support department).
In the ticket you must answer the following questions:
Why do you want to be a moderator at Entrecard?
How do you feel you could contribute best to the community as a moderator?
Have you had any previous experience moderating or in customer support, if so please provide details?
How long have you been blogging?
What do you see as the one biggest issue with Entrecard at the moment?
Following on from the above question, how would you change things to resolve that issue?
Finally are there any other comments you would like to make?
When you log the support ticket please insure you fill out all the appropriate fields (with the exception of which browser you are using).
The application process will be open until Sunday the 4th of January 2009, however may be extended at our discression if we find we are getting a lot of applications. Following this each application will be screened by a staff member and then the best ones will be selected for futher consideration.
If you have any questions please leave a comment and I will answer as best I can.
Cheers
Stuart
Written on December 17th, 2008 by Graham
This is just a quick announcement:
For a limited time, we have lifted transfer limits to 25,000 credits per week that you may transfer.
Hopefully, this will encourage members to hold bigger contests more frequently, without the need for coordination from Entrecard.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please voice them below, as I will be answering comments.
Written on December 14th, 2008 by Graham
Definitely something you should see if you are a current Wordpress user, or thinking about using Wordpress for blogging:
Written on December 12th, 2008 by Graham
In our constant effort to maximize Entrecard’s performance and speed, we have just doubled the RAM on our Database server. We saw this as the single most performance-enhancing move we could make to improve the speed and service stability, and we’re quite glad we made it.
Just wanted to pass along the good news, in case you were wondering “Does Entrecard seem faster today?” -and sorry to everyone who was trying to use Entrecard for ten minutes this morning while our server was offline getting the RAM installed.
Written on December 11th, 2008 by Graham
This week, Microsoft launched an open source blogging platform named Oxite. The software itself seems pretty sleek. It boats the basics like RSS, comment moderation, good permalink structure out of the box, and support for multiple bloggers and multiple blogs. It also has some bells and whistles like gravatar support, an authenticated comment system, pingbacks, trackbacks, and more.
but there is one really huge catch…
Don’t expect to see Microsoft’s new blog platform competing with Wordpress or Blogger any time soon. Oxite is very clearly a push to satisfy the needs of a good Content Management System for developers working with the Microsoft platform. The software only works on the Microsoft stack and requires Windows hosting. For those of you running blogs on free hosting (like blogger), anyone in the hosting business will tell you that Linux hosting is far superior, and cheaper, than Winows hosting. Also, because it was made primarily for use by developers, it is not nearly as user-friendly as the Wordpress system.
Microsoft, oh Microsoft. When will you get it right on the net? You should be competing with Google and Wordpress for a market share of the blogosphere with everything you’ve got…
Written on December 8th, 2008 by Graham
The Social Arrow had some great Twitter tips for us yesterday in the Forums.
Tip #1: Using Twitter Search
Use http://search.twitter.com/ to find out what people are talking about subjects you are interested in, follow and interact with the ones that appear to have similar interests and an active profile. By posting replies to random people twittering about similar interests, you will build a network of friends with similar interests who may, by proxy, be interested in your blog.
Tip #2: Using Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is a way to really organize your twitters and see them in a more visually appealing manner. There’s a nice little overview about it over at this guys blog: http://www.corporatedollar.org/2008/11/video-post-how-to-use-tweetdeck..
Thanks for the quick-tips, Social Arrow! Don’t forget to follow Social Arrow on Twitter.
Written on December 8th, 2008 by Graham
Yesterday I was in the forums asking for Twitter tips. The first Twitter Tip comes from Steven Wilson of Steven Wilson’s Marketing Blog. Steven advocates the use of a “Twitter Client” named Twhirl. Twhirl runs off your desktop, the same way AIM does if you’ve used that in the past. So instead of tweeting from the awkward twitter homepage, you’re using a smoother and more convenient interface. But that’s just the beginning. Taken from the Twhirl homepage, Twhirl boasts these features:
- runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX
- notifications on new messages
- shorten long URLs (using snurl, twurl or is.gd)
- post images to TwitPic
- search tweets using Twitter Search and TweetScan
- timeline filtering
- color schemes
So if you’re serious about your Twitter use, Twhirl is a must. And don’t forget to follow Steven Wilson on Twitter.
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