Archive for June, 2008
Written on June 29th, 2008 by Graham
The Entrecard Comment Rush is a community project to spotlight a blog just like yours, and get the entire Entrecard community interacting with each other outside of the gated walls of Entrecard.com, sharing our thoughts and feelings in a way that is motivational and supportive to our fellow members.
For the first ever Comment Rush, we have chosen Ken Armstrong’s post “Music and Driving.” The post talks about something I’m sure most of us can relate to- hearing a particular song, while driving in a car, and having that song leave such a lasting imprint in our memories that we will remember it for the rest of our lives.
Please show your support for the Entrecard community, and head over to Ken’s blog and share an experience you’ve had like this.
UPDATE:
Wow! 55 Comments so far! We’re more than half way to our goal of 100 comments! Thanks for everyone who has taken the time to show a little support for a fellow blogger!
UPDATE #2:
Comment Rush #1 was an overwhelming success! It took just 7 hours to hit our goal of 100 comments! As of this update, Ken has 121 149 comments. Congratulations Ken and a big thanks to everyone who showed their support! See you for next week’s comment rush!
Written on June 26th, 2008 by Graham
“Quick Drop” pages, also known as “Power Drop” pages look like this:
Basically a blank page with an Entrecard widget, sometimes some extra junk like an ad is there too.
Effective July 1, all accounts of members operating quick drop pages will be deleted from the Entrecard network. This post, accompanied by a system-wide email going out, will serve as the warning.
IMPORTANT: If you currently have a “Quick Drop” page a.k.a. “Power Drop” page, you must take it down by July 1, 2008.
Starting July 1st, we will be going through a massive list of quick drop pages we have amassed. Accounts will be permanently closed on-sight if the quick drop pages are still active. Requests to be reinstated will be ignored. Credits will be permanently lost.
Why are we banning quick drop pages?
Our golden rule at Entrecard is to preserve the quality of our network. As stated in our Terms of Service, we respect the right to remove any account we feel is de-valuing the network. Collectively, everyone operating a quick drop page is devaluing the network by providing an incentive to drop on their quick loading widget-only page. Members are bookmarking 300 of these pages in an attempt to earn credits quickly and efficiently, without actually visiting the blogs in question. This itself constitutes illegal dropping. So not only are quick drop pages now illegal, but our drop-penalty gear may begin inflicting stiff credit penalties, starting July 1, on people dropping on quick drop pages.
What if I don’t have a Quick Drop page?
Then you’re fine. Disregard the email and this blog post, but make sure not to drop on them, as you may incur penalties. Make sure any widget you drop on is located on a regular blog.
Have a good one,
Entrecard Team
Written on June 25th, 2008 by multippt
Sounds like Entrecard’s new “market price” model is being manipulated by others who are selling credits way below the official price set by Entrecard. Predatory pricing is not an advisable practice as it results in rapid devaluation of Entrecard credits, or inflation which would lead to long term consequences.
Nonetheless, it does raise a pretty interesting question – is 1000 Entrecard credits really worth $9.50? If others are able to price even over 7000 credits at a mere $17 on auction sites like Ebay, it just goes to show that perhaps Entrecard overpricing its own credits. A more surprising find is that most of the auctions go for less than half of the price allocated by Entrecard.
On the other hand, the price of $9.50 is certainly justified in some cases, particularly in the eyes of Entrecard and the majority of users. After all, this $9.50 isn’t really going to go to the pockets of Entrecard. Rather, it goes back to the community, and if you happen to be one of the lucky few who got chosen to sell credits back to Entrecard, you’ll largely benefit from this.
However, for those who unfortunately many who aren’t “selected”, the option of selling credits elsewhere is probably better than ideal. After all, what would be a better way to “waste” your thousands of credits other than simply spending all of it on buying ads? Selling credits for some cash probably beats having your credits sit in your account when you have no idea what to do with it.
Nonetheless, I feel that the price given by Entrecard should not change. Rather, the price should remain fixed for the coming days until a conclusion has been reached on whether the pricing decision made by Entrecard is suitable or not. In the meantime, if you do wish to purchase Entrecard credits from Ebay, do go ahead (Entrecard hasn’t forbid that yet), but remember that those sources are not verified, unlike Entrecard which you can be assured you will get your credits. However, I feel that the ultimate solution to the price disputes is that Entrecard should probably do what users on Ebay has done – auction the credits off. A system like this ensures predatory pricing never takes place, and that the prices are decided by the community themselves.
What’s your take on this?
Credits to GrandWealthForever for giving a tip off this.
Written on June 22nd, 2008 by phirate
Please note, the TOS will be changed in the following manner. Those users affected by this change that we are aware of, have been notified. Existing affected users who have not received notification will receive one warning four days prior to the change applying to their account.
The TOS will have the following condition appended:
Entrecard will no longer accept sites representing themselves as religious organizations or any other charitable organization for the purposes of soliciting donations without the account being held directly by a registered charity. Such charities should apply to us directly, providing their listing on the IRS site:
http://www.irs.gov/app/pub-78/
Or the appropriate site for their country. Details given by the IRS will be contacted to verify the account is to be held by the charity concerned.
Entrecard does not discriminate on the basis of religion or other affiliation, this ruling applies to all charities and is in place to help protect Entrecard users from fraud.
Written on June 22nd, 2008 by Liane
Here’s an article containing a step-by-step procedure with detailed discussions, tips, rants and of course, my personal notes for setting up one unconventional contest that would surely rock your blog- Entrecard contests here we go!
Entrecard Contests?
Many of you might already be familiar with Entrecard contests. Either you have joined or made one in your blog before. This new breed of contest could get very easy to make and doubly attractive to participate in. Simply put, large Entrecard credit prizes and giveaways attract many bloggers instantly (especially the thousands of the Entrecard fanatics). Not only does it take the least amount of time to make one than those conventional contests, it does work with its own fast acting charm too.
Advantages and the Plus Factors
You must be a believer on the power of Entrecard contests. For this, let me give you reasons on an how Entrecard contests leads in comparison to the usual contest that we frequently hear about.
1.It’s easy, affordable and a whole lot faster. Instead of having to look for sponsors or digging into your PayPal to buy the outrageous prizes, all you need to do is use your own credits or buy some more. In the usual contest, bloggers would usually need more than a week to plan the contest alone, practically looking for sponsors who can offer cash, a year of free domain and hosting, some premium Wordpress themes and many more. It takes A LOT of money, A LOT of time and A LOT MORE of your precious effort.
2. It attracts people like magic. Ask yourself, if you’ve stumbled across some contest with all the usual prizes and stuff, do you still get pretty excited? I’ve seen (and joined) a lot of them before. Then I started to get tired, maybe because I didn’t win in any of them. That or they just had the same thing to offer. With Entrecard Credits, it’s already a sure thing. Many want, need, and are addicted to getting more credits. That’s why card dropping have been so much as a daily blogger habit. Just like how the EC swept the online world by storm, it would work the same brilliant way as your contest jackpot.
3. It always shows a bigger prize than the real money value. When you see a contest entitled “Contest: $25 at Stake!”. Would you be really interested to join? Sure 25 dollars might be some good cash, but would it be all worth the trouble of joining? Admit it, you’ll have some doubts yourself of participating. How much more if your prize money is some 10 to 15 dollars? But then think of this, what if, you use that 25 dollars to buy Entrecard Credits and then use it as a prize? I’m not quite sure how many credits that would be, (if 2000 ECs is equal to $10 just like what the result in Google says) about 4,500 ECs right? You see, 4,500 ECs looks way more bigger and attractive than plain $25.
4. The prize would really be useful. Back to the example where we assumed $25 is about 4,500 ECs. Let’s think that the moment you have seen this 4,500 ECs prize, you have converted it to cash and thus have figured that the prize is really at $25 value. Even at this point, it would still be more attractive than placing $25 as the prize. Why? To simply put it, Entrecard Credits is a whole lot useful than money when it comes to your blog’s benefit. You can use it to advertise your blog to others, you can use it to buy an advert space, you can use it as a means of payment for whatever thing you have your eye on.
On top of that, distributing the prize is easy. All you have to do is go to the winner’s Entrecard profile and just send in the credits. Done! Now that’s what I call easy as pie.
Time To Make Your Own Entrecard Contest
I hope I had you 100% convinced about this whole Entrecard contest. By now, you ought to start one yourself. But wait! You might ask, why should you make a contest in the first place. Its actually a no-brainer, still if you have little or no idea, go here to read Contest Beat’s article on why you should make your own contest. If you’re done reading that, let’s get started.
Planning Stage
Because of the simplicity of the Entrecard credits, planning an Entrecard credit based contest wouldn’t be anything close to hard. The first thing you should think of is…
The Prize. This would be the center of attraction so you just have to make sure it’s a good big number. If you have a lot of credits in store, you just need to budget things and make sure there would still be a good amount of credits left for you. If you are running short on ECs, no worries. Just go buy! Remember to be an early bird at the EC store. It’s a first come first serve basis, you wouldn’t want to get there and find out that the stock has run out again. Been there, done that.
Tip: If you’re looking to raise your EC prize, why not look for EC sponsors and donors! And again, it’s much easier than finding persons who would sponsor for cash and other lucrative prizes. Give your friends at Entrecard a message and kindly ask if they would like to sponsor your upcoming contest. Say that you’ll give them an extra exposure at your site if they’d decide to sponsor. If I’m right, they’d be happy to. Just make sure that they are not running low on ECs themselves (and don’t ask me how to find out because I have totally no idea). I suppose bloggers owning blogs with big advertising prize here at Entrecard have a lot of ECs lurking on their account. So go ask those bloggers.
The Mechanics. If there’s a prize there should be an instruction on ‘how to get a shot at the prize’. Decide on your own contest rules up to the tiny bit of detail. Are gonna use a simple requirement or would you prefer a range of pointing system? It’s all up to you!
Tip: As much as possible, don’t opt for a hard requirement on how to join. Those like write-a-post-to-join contest attracts very few participants (unless if it’s a popular blog hosting the contest). People just get turned off if they figured that it would take a lot of effort just to join. You could just apply things like comment at my post, subscribe to my feeds, favorite me at Technorati and other simpler stuffs. Don’t give your future participants a hard time. They’ll appreciate it more if you require much easier things.
The Deadline. Here’s a thing about deadlines, you should always keep it to less than a month. Better if two weeks prior to the announcement of the contest. You know why? Because there’s this thing called momentum. Contests are supposed to be exciting and fun and all in as much rush. If you go post the deadline to after a month, trust me, within two to three weeks, your contest will start to get stale. You might be thinking, ‘if I would have a longer deadline, there might be more participants’. Well you might think so. But how about those people who were the first in the line? After a month, they’ll be forgetting about your contest and there’ll be little fun or exciting or fresh about it.
Tip: That’s why you should try to keep your contest deadline as close as possible. Make people rush in and make sure you’re keeping that momentum. It’ll be a buzz to the people around!
Other Important Notes for Creating a Successful Entrecard Contest
Invite people to join! Especially the avid Entrecard Droppers. There’s no other thing worse than having nobody for a participant. Spread the word about your contest and never ever forget to invite people you know here at Entrecard (especially your serious droppers). Who would have been more interested in joining an Entrecard contest than an avid Entrecarder himself (or herself). If you’re already running an Entrecard contest by now, don’t forget to give us a message by placing a comment below.
Make sure you have a way to keep track of your participants. You might have required, favorite me at technorati, digg, stumble my posts, subscribe to my feeds etc. Whatever it is, make sure you can identify who have joined and which part of the required actions they had done. Usually, a simple leave a comment with your name, blog and email will do the trick.
Give an incentive for every participant. This is my personal trick to attract more participants for every contest. I haven’t used this myself but I’ve been offering it to others planning to host a contest now. The trick is to give a little something for every participant so that their will be greater chances for more people to join. It’s like nobody goes home empty handed. For example, I have offered to sponsor contests out there by giving a copy of my blogging ebook for every participant that would join their contest, and yes, I do have my own free blogging ebook. Anyway, by doing this, you’ll attract more participants. And what does more participants mean? Well to start with, it means a successful contest. You could offer little things like some 5 to 10 EC for every participant. Or you could call me for I’d be interested to sponsor your Entrecard contest with my blogging ebook.
Wrapping it All Up
A little fast fact: For the record, this have been the longest post that I’ve ever written in my own blogging career. And thus according to MS word count: 4 pages, 1,816 words, 8,148 characters with no spaces, 9,941 with spaces, 30 paragraphs, 158 lines, 1,816 non Asian words and counting. Whew. I can’t believe how much engrossed I am with this topic.
When it comes to my opinion, I think Entrecard (without even realizing or planning on it) have offered a new way of online contests that have made (yet again) things way much easier, not to mention fresh. It doesn’t take much time, money and effort, yet look how great it could be. The possibilities of hosting your EC based contest and reaping tons of benefits could be as high as a 100% (in my honest opinion that is). So what are you folks waiting for? Start setting up your own contest, I’ll be waiting for you to invite me.
I’ve never been lucky enough to win any contest. But I sure love trying!
Written on June 20th, 2008 by phirate
Ok, the outage I canceled the other day is now going ahead, in an attempt to deal with the slow problems we’re having right now. The outage will start at 4am Boston time (click for more timezones) and is scheduled for 2 hours. I do not intend to use all this time but historically database manipulations have taken longer than anticipated so I’m giving myself plenty of breathing room. Hopefully this will be the last performance outage we need to have for a while.
Written on June 20th, 2008 by Graham
Hooray for the Alexa-killer from the big G, Google Website Trends
With Google Trends, you can compare the traffic of any website(s) to see how it is trending. The main benefit that Google has over Alexa, in this case, is that
it’s accurate.
That’s right, Google has got it right. And why shouldn’t they? Their analytics is installed on almost every website in existence, and their search engine is the flood gate to nearly all the traffic on the internet.
Here’s Entrecard’s Google Trend graph:
Gearing up for the next spike!
How does yours look?
Written on June 18th, 2008 by AskTheAdmin
First of all I would like to thank Graham for the opportunity to address the Entrecard users out there (Or at least the ones that read the blog!). I have been using the free blogging advertising network almost since launch. I have watched it grow and flourish as a system. But, better yet I have watched it give back to those that put the most time and effort into it.I watched as several bloggers came out of obscurity to becoming sites that I visit on a daily basis. I began getting reviews from other EC users and then messages. I could not believe what a AWESOME group of people have formed in a single place. What EC has become to me is a central location of people collectively trying to do the same thing. And that is promote their blogs among other bloggers. EC helps you gain some respect from your peers (if you deserve it) or at the very least gain some insight on what you are doing wrong.I have not only made some GREAT friends on EC I have taken on guest bloggers and others looking to help out. Who wouldn’t like a platform that allows you to promote yourself, meet other like minded people and still be a form of entertainment. I used to be a HUGE stumble upon fan but since getting down with EC I have laid off the stumbling and started EC Surfing!
I start with whatever site is on AskTheAdmin’s EC for the day and click through to their site, and then I click on their sites EC and so on and so on. I always find some interesting posts and even entertaining sites.
So as you can see I am a big fan of EC and could not pass up this opportunity to profess it to the world (or at least to the EC blog readers!).
Do you have a success story that EC helped you achieve? Do you have any ideas to help improve on EC?
What do you think of an EC tool bar that lets you surf EC sites, leave recommendations, see stats on the fly and purchase ads? Do you think that would go over well. Hit us up in the comments bloggers! Don’t be shy.
_TheFriendlyNeighborhoodAdmiN_
Written on June 17th, 2008 by phirate
We’re going to have an outage at 5AM Boston time (click for more timezones) to attempt to deal with performance issues that have been causing problems the last two days. While things are kind of ok at the moment I’m not happy with the stability. This outage is scheduled for 1 hour. Thanks everyone for your understanding in this matter, it’s not easy to manage datasets of this size with the resources we have, and it requires some serious work.
Update: outage has been canceled, I’m doing some more work int he background to try and find the most effective options at the moment, it’ll take some more time to collect the data I need.
Written on June 16th, 2008 by Arachne Jericho
The most difficult task for any blogger is simply stated, and not easily solved:
How do I make people care?
It doesn’t matter if you’re writing articles, memoirs, or stories; or whether you’re writing short bites or longer exploratory essays. Getting people to care enough to read you is hard—especially if they don’t know who you are.
So how do you get over that barrier of silence? How do you break the ice?
Let me tell you: it’s not enough to have good content. It’s also about presentation and communication, baby, and here are four important principles I’ve learned over the years.
But first…
Why Good Content Is Not Enough
Earlier I wrote 4 Principles for Packing a Punch with Unique Content. Those tenets continue to be true, but unique and good alone isn’t enough to generate audience draw—although they are a very good start and, nay, a requirement.
For example: I could write an article about why bounce rates aren’t the answer to detecting love from teh Internets. It’s a fairly unique stance and I can add some interesting details not usually covered in those sorts of articles. All in all, generally good stuff.
But if I don’t connect to you, my audience, from the start; if I can’t make you care about the question and my answer; if I can’t communicate my ideas in a fashion that you understand—what good is that article?
No good at all.
It is nominative wisdom that caring about the audience is the least important aspect of writing. In a way this is true—content is king. But part of the principles of good writing is actually being able to communicate well.
If content is king, then communication is queen.
So let’s explore ways in which to improve communication.
Four Principles for Writing Compelling Content
Principle #1: Who’s your audience?
This principle is otherwise known as relevancy.
First of all, decide who you’re writing for. It’s important to start out here, because if you have no idea who your intended audience is, how can you know what subjects interest them? And how can you deliver that information in ways that are meaningful to them?
Secondly, once you’ve decided your general audience, start working down to more specific particulars about that audience. Are they experienced, or inexperienced? Technologically addicted, or relatively luddite apart from owning an iPod? Do they deeply care about music, or do they just have a passing curious interest?
This principle may seem obvious when applied to blogging about fishing or writing or the like, but it’s also important for fiction and memoirs. If I’m writing science fiction for hard SF fans, I’m working under completely different considerations than if I’m writing a steampunk fantasy to appeal to a more mainstream audience, and different still if I’m writing an eccentric buddy-buddy mystery.
An audience is the first step. Now you need some grist for your wheel.
Principle #2: Answer an interesting question.
It may not be obvious that a writer is answering a question in their story or article; and even good writers may not think about their writing that way. But I’ve noticed that the writing that compels me to read is something that answers a question I’m curious about. This applies even to fiction, and definitely to memoirs.
So: think of a question that you can answer, and present it to your audience. It’s this question that draws them in. Anything from “Will Wilson ever forgive House?” to “Should I worry about bounce rate?” to “But what funny thing did happen to you on your way to the seashore in ‘82, and how was Michael Jackson involved?”
And of course, the right question to ask, as well as how you present your answer, depends on Principle #1, Who’s Your Audience?
These interesting questions are either already latent in your audience, such as whether the Kindle is really worth $400, or are questions you manage to provoke in them, like the ancient mariner who stops a passerby to tell his harrowing tale. Research is necessary for both kinds of questions, though the first you’ll easily find being asked widely across the web, while the second is much harder to deal with, but usually the only game in town for fiction and memoir.
Now that you have your audience and your questions, it’s time to match them up against each other.
Principle #3: Hook them in.
A hook is the first sentence, or maybe two if you’re lucky, that leads into your post, article, story, whatever.
This is the punch that gets their attention; this is where you tell them that this matters. And a few words are all you have to work with. People don’t have time to wait around for you to get to the point, whether or not they’re power-dropping—so tell them now, and tell them in an engaging way.
The question you wish to answer can, due to its already relevant and compelling nature, be considered a good hook. However, the full question plainly stated may not work, because the full question may be more than a few sentences and will probably require setting up context, explaining some point, etc.
You don’t have time for all that in a hook, in those few seconds that someone scans your article excerpts. Which means that you must find a simple and compelling lead-in question, something small that will allow people to interest themselves and thus give you time to set up your real question. But your lead-in and your main questions must be related; if there’s one way to unhook people fast, it’s to lead them in with one thing and then talk about something else entirely different.
Fiction and memoir, actually, offer the most interesting exercise of lead-in and main question because of their more nebulous nature. You could start out with the question of how a man will earn his rent money for the month after being fired, and then story events lead to the question of how he gets out of a murder rap after getting himself into trouble for money. Same principle, much more imagination (and also much harder).
Now, once you’ve grabbed your audience, it’s important that you don’t ever let them go. And that where the next principle comes in.
Principle #4: Voice.
This is the most difficult principle of all, and without it the earlier three principles fall apart. Voice goes beyond style—because style is what you can’t help doing, and voice is how you address your audience. My style of writing tends to stay the same from article to blog to story; but my voice changes between them. Voice is somewhat conscious; style, typically not.
For a writer, voice is the words chosen; the sentence structures applied; the way that one point is lead into another; and more. In other words, voice is presentation. And like the verbal kind of voice when applied to speeches, it’s also a form of acting. And like any acting, there’s a full range. And also unfortunate extremes, such as Keanu Reeves dead acting, and William Shatner over-the-top acting.
You need to find a voice that fits who you’re writing to (your audience), what you’re writing about (your answer to your question), and—most difficult all—that still fits you. An unnatural voice is as noticeable as an actor who’s phoning his performance in, and leaves as just a bad taste in the mouth.
Finding your voice is difficult, especially if you’re not an experienced writer. It’s only through practice and application, lots of it, that you find your voice—and, indeed, gain the confidence of execution that lets you find your voice in the first place, rather than being far too nervous to even express one.
A Practical Example: This Article
The principles I’ve outlined to you are the same ones I used in composing this article. So let’s take a very brief look at how I covered each of the above points:
Who’s your audience?
The EntreCard audience. All EntreCard participants are bloggers and thus matters of a blogging aspect matter to them—and that includes content and writing.
For this particular article, I’m also not just speaking to a segment of EntreCard concerned with writing specifically, but I’m also talking to hobby writers, technical writers, music/TV/movie reviewers, personal bloggers, serial story writers. Fortunately we are all bloggers, so we have a common shared interest.
Answer a question.
There are quite a few questions that intrigue bloggers of any stripe, but since EntreCard’s recent (at the time of this writing) announcement that people would be credited for blogging often, questions surrounding the generation of content seem to be a good bet for relevancy to EntreCarders.
One perrenial content question, and one that I often ask when I’m visiting EC blogs or contemplating the entrecard.com referral statistics in my logs,is the matter of writing content that draws people in past the yellow box. Compelling content.
The full question is:
What are the four principles of compelling writing and how can they be practically applied to blogging, covering not just non-fiction, but also fiction and memoirs?
I usually like to break up my question in terms of a small number of principles that I explore individually, because that is more useful to people than “Here’s what compelling writing is. Now do it.”
People are very fond of useful. The 15,000 hits to one of my tutorial articles tells me so.
Hook them in.
The full question above is way too involved. Even if I were just to break it up into smaller questions, the main question of “What are the four princples of compelling writing?” just doesn’t connect with people quickly enough.
So I came up with a more basic question: How do I make people care? Because that’s why we want to learn to write compellingly. It’s why people would care.
With that as my lead-in, everything else fell into place.
Voice.
Back when I was in academia, I wrote very properly, explored things as thoroughly, thought about as over-much as I do today.
The difference is voice. The voice I use for this post, and for almost everywhere else apart from work and fiction, is conversational, down-to-earth, not above references or small jokes, and not above swearing. It’s also confident, eager, and assertive. This voice also has resonances from other bloggers and writers I’ve read in the past and whose styles I’ve unconsciously absorbed, until I look at my word choice from time to time.
In the real world, of course, I’m not at all confident. In a way, that’s why I like blogging so much. Nowhere else is the need to be confident so immediately apparent and necessary. Nowhere else is writing so much of a performance art.
Nowhere else is being compelling so necessary on a constant basis.
Closing and Gratitudes
Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this article and that it proves useful.
I would also like to thank the EntreCard staff for providing one of the most engaging link exchange networks I’ve had the pleasure to be part of. Without them, this article would not have been possible, on multiple levels.
For more articles like these, please visit my main stomping grounds, Spontaneous Derivation, where I explore the unholy marriage of writing and blogging. And in case you are curious about how I apply my voice and these techniques in other areas, you can also visit my Sherlock Holmes screeds and my my web fiction (no fanfic at either link, I’m afraid).
