Monday Happy Hour

Written on March 30th, 2009 by Graham

Hey there Entrecarders,

Most days, like today for example, I work from a co-working space in Santa Cruz California called NextSpace.

There are a lot of freelancers, graphic designers, developers, and programmers in my neck of the woods. So one day some Santa Cruz entrepreneurs got together and created a comfortable and bright place where all these people can come together and work in an “office environment.” The benefits to co-worker are clearly evident:  you get to meet lots of people who are up to lots of interesting things, make new friends, share new ideas, and if you are trying to get one of them off the ground, you can find all the talent you need here under one roof.

Every Friday at NextSpace everyone gets together in the lounge area and gives each other updates with their various projects and companies. Lots of pizzas are involved.

At the last Friday happy hour, I was sharing with everyone details of the ad platform Entrecard is launching. As I was talking about it, I couldn’t stop thinking about how Entrecard members could really benefit from this same group announcement / interaction time. Its great for building relationships with our co-workers, and when you run a blog all the other bloggers in the blogosphere are essentailly your co-workers. But how many of your co-workers do you really know?

Entrecard wants to play a role helping you meet your co-workers in the blogosphere. So, without further ado, I have lots of updates from the Entrecard community for this weeks Monday Happy Hour! (PS: I’ve also taken the time to respond to each one. You should too, in the comments!)

It’s been a busy week!

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From Larry:

reply:

Thanks Larry! It’s always good to see members linking to their top card droppers for the month (our post is coming out tomorrow!) and I know that many Entrecard members are always looking for tip-offs to good traffic-generating blog to advertise on. Right on!

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From Victoria:

bikudesigns is having a jewelry giveaway.

The winner will be drawn on Monday 6th April. Check out this link for more information.

reply:

Whoa, that ring is way cool! Someone is going to be super lucky to win it! Are you selling any of them in the Entrecard market??

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From Gengen:

I just want to share about my ongoing contest at Wonderful Things In Life. They can win jewelries, lots of EC credits, blog makeover, web hosting plus domain, ad spaces and many more. The details of the contest is here: http://mommyko.com/2009/03/chris-birthday-bash-contest-win.html This contest is in celebration to my son’s 3rd birthday which is this coming March 31 but the contest will end April 10. The mechanics of the contest is very easy and i will use the random.org to proclaim the winners.

Another news is DarlingRose Designs which is my online store have on sale items. I hope many of the people will visit and buy the items. Thank you very much. God speed.

reply:

Gengen, Tell you son I said happy birthday! Have you thought about setting up an EC trust fund for him so when he starts blogging, he’ll be able to buy enough advertising to launch his blog to great heights! Thanks for updating us on the contest and good luck with selling your on sale items!

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From Lou:

My blog Peregrination.today.com is holding an Entrecard competition. There are over $45, 100 000 ECs and 40 ad spaces to be given away. The contest ends on the 9th of April.

The link to the contest is here. http://peregrination.today.com/awesome-blog-contest/ . There is a poster for the competition. The link is below.

http://i710.photobucket.com/albums/ww103/loutianren/3322385563_1798fb2900.jpg?t=1236366538 (333×500)

http://i710.photobucket.com/albums/ww103/loutianren/3322385563_fd424a34b1_o.jpg?t=1236366928 (600×900)

Thanks,

Lou

reply:

Thanks for updating us Lou! Good luck with the contest and I hope you consider getting a free blog at blogspot and being a continued member of our community after the new Entrecard ordinance from Today.com goes into effect.

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From Nips:

Well my news is that I’ve moved my Nipplelicious blog from Today.com to its new home of  http://www.nipplelicious.blogspot.com/. I’m still trying to work my way around there, but it should be interesting. I’ve also removed my mother for life blog from the entrecard list for now. I’m going to wait and see how one move goes before I attempt another..

P.S. Still looking for a blogger mentor to help me learn the ins and outs..

reply:

Awesome to see that you moved your blog to stick with Entrecard! I hope the move went smoothly. We should be able to find you a mentor amongst our many members. Hey Everybody! who wants to show nips the ins and outs of blogging?

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From Krystal:

I have one of the bags on my blog reduced til the end of the month ( Tuesday 3/31)

reply:

Those are cool bags. I might have to buy one for a girl friend of mine! Why not put some for sale in the Entrecard market?

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From Heathen Mom:

Heathen Homeschoolers will have two contests beginning on Monday.  The

Monday Happy Hour contest will have entrecard credits as the prize.  The

other contest will have books as the prize.  Visit my site at

www.heathenhomeschoolers.com for details on Monday.

reply:

Rock on Heathen Mom!! Who doesn’t love a good Entrecard contest? It’s one of the best ways to build traffic. Way to take advantage of your resources!

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From Mr. Elusive:

I am running a contest giving away a free BlackBerry Bold; details can be found here http://mrelusiveblog.com/free-st/twitter-users-win-an-unlocked-blackberry-bold/

Regards,

Mr. Elusive

reply:

Whoa! A blackberry! Now that’s a prize!! What’s next, an iPhone??

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From Kunal:

Hey Graham,

Entrecard TRAFFIC broken down

Written on March 27th, 2009 by Graham

Greetings Entrecarders!

Today, I’d like to share with you the many wonderous ways Entrecard brings you traffic. We here have worked hard to bring you traffic from a number of sources to make your Entrecard membership as valuable to you as possible.

It’s not doubt that as soon as you got involved in Entrecard, you’re traffic has shot up. Here’s where it’s coming from.

The Entrecard Toolbar

The Entrecard toolbar for Firefox is used daily by tens of thousands of bloggers. What the toolbar allows you to do is browse all the blogs in Entrecard by a number of filters including category, by favorites, cheapest to advertise on, most popular, most expensive, and more. With the click of a button you can jump to the next site, or open 10 sites in your browser. Not only that, but advertising from any blog in our entire network is just a single click from the toolbar!

All of our toolbar traffic registers on your analytics as “direct traffic” -so unfortunately there is no way for you to tell just how much traffic you’re getting from our toolbar. Consider toolbar traffic an “added bonus” for being an Entrecard member!

Our on-site directory

Every month, MILLIONS (yes, millions) of visits to our members blogs come from our directory of members. You get your share in this traffic just by being a member -but the higher you’re listed in our directory, the more traffic you’ll get from it. Getting listed high in this category is all about one thing: getting the most drops possible. The category is ordered from the blog receiving the most drops to the blog receiving the least. But no matter how many drops you’re getting, you’re still getting traffic from our directory! If you use Google Analytics, this traffic will register as coming from entrecard.com.

Ads!

Entrecard is all about buying ads with our virtual currency that you earn for free. Collectively, these ads channel over 5 million monthly visits to our members blogs. Right now you can buy ads on over 30,000 blogs across 60 vertical niches. These ads bring you traffic, and since we implemented our one-page down rule, these ads should be bringing you more traffic than ever before as they become exposed to a wider audience. The amount of traffic you get from your ads is based almost entirely on how many you buy, so head over to our directory to start buying ads with all those credits you’ve been earning. If you use Google Analytics, this traffic will register as coming from s3.amazonaws.com

Marketplace

Our marketplace allows you to buy and sell all types of products and services for Entrecard Credits. MANY offerings in the market bring you more traffic, from multiple forms of advertising on sale across many different sites, to more controversial digg and stumble services. In fact, here are hundreds of ways you can get more traffic with Entrecard.

As we work hard to build a service that brings our bloggers as much traffic as possible, we encourage you to take full advantage of not one but all possible strategies for garnering traffic. Make Entrecard work for you! Many bloggers now have sucessfully used Entrecard to build large followings. Have you?

JS-Kit acquires SezWho: What it means for Entrecarders

Written on March 25th, 2009 by Graham

Greetings Entrecarders!

Today you will notice a significant change on the Entrecard blog. We have swapped out the SezWho comment service in exchange for JS-Kit comments. We’d like to thank all those Entrecarders who signed up with our partner SezWho in the past. We believe it has been a great benefit to our blogger members to have advanced comment features installed for their sites.

As you may have heard, SezWho has been unable to raise funding to continue their service and they need to shut down the site. Fortunately, our friends at JS-Kit have provided the resources necessary to keep the SezWho service up and running until March 31, 2009. This means that in a short time, the SezWho service will no longer be operational. We are, however, recommending that all of our members currently using SezWho take the opportunity to switch over to JS-Kit.

We strongly encourage you to Upgrade Now to avoid disruptions. Signing up for JS-Kit is quicker and easier than any of the competing comment platforms, and their gear is lighter and loads faster. In fact, JS-Kit is the world’s largest distributed social network, connecting over 600,000 publishers with light weight, cross domain services, including Comments, Ratings, and Polls.

They recently raised 3.6m in a Series B and are used by major brands such as JetBlue, Sun, Experian, Evite and AOL.

Here’s a quick note from Khris Loux, CEO JS-Kit:

“We welcome SezWho publishers to the JS-Kit family and look forward to supporting you and your visitors. Our mission is to empower publishers to quickly and easily create social experiences on their sites. I look forward to hearing from the SezWho community to learn how we can continue to improve our products and services to meet your needs.”

Comments are one of the most important parts of a blog, and as such we take our comments very seriously at Entrecard. It is therefore with great pride that we switch our commenting service to JS-Kit, and encourage you to do the same.

Cheers,
Graham Langdon
CEO – Entrecard.com Inc.

Cleaning Up Entrecard Contest Winners. Congratulations!

Written on March 25th, 2009 by Andy T

The reward for the contest winners were as follows:

1. 10,000 EC
2. 5,000 EC
3. 2,500 EC
4. 1,000 EC
5. 1,000 EC
6. 1,000 EC
7. 1,000 EC
8. 1,000 EC
9. 1,000 EC
10. 1,000 EC

System updates, 1 of a few

Written on March 24th, 2009 by phirate

Ok, over the next 24 hours we’re going to be bringing online a number of the foundation pieces of the new ad system. It is important to note: this will not enable paid ads, it is the new advert delivery system that is capable of paid ads, but no paid ads will be going out on the network until we have done further updates, all of which will be clearly announced. At this stage, there is only one widely user-visible change:

1. If your widget is not currently running an EC user ad (ie, a regular ad that you’ve approved as normal), then instead of running your own card, it will display a generic “this is an entrecard widget” with a click-through to Entrecard.

This is actually a long-requested “feature”, but the main reason we’re doing it is because it was the least-harmful way we could come up with to ensure that the alternate-ad part of the software was working nicely under load.

In addition, there are two other situations you may encounter – hopefully rarely:

1. When a widget loads, the card-space may display a spinner for 5 seconds or so. This should be very rare, and basically means the advert management system hasn’t seen a request for this card recently and needs to ask the main database about it. The spinner will go away when the system has the information. In rare situations a mis-configuration of the widget by the site owner may mean nothing is displayed at all after a minute. Please be patient with us while we deal with situations like that and don’t bury the poor support guys

2. On a rare occasion, clicking on a card to go to the site may fail and give you a note from Entrecard saying that we couldn’t find the link. This should be extremely rare, can you can probably resolve it by hitting your back button to go back to the site you came from and hitting reload. It basically means you loaded the ad before we did a reset on the advert system and then you clicked afterwards – just unlucky.

A side-effect of the code we’re adding to manage the paid ads is that we will have, in database, a track of the impressions each spot and each advert does. On a per-spot basis it is our current intention to keep this information completely private, however we welcome discussion on this issue (ie, we will not show impressions on your public profile, nor will we show impressions on a spot advert. We could optionally offer you a checkbox where you can say “Share my impressions publically”, I don’t know if there is any demand for this.).

We appreciate your patience. I am confident that the new system will result in many more benefits than those we’re immediately deploying, we hope to be able to use it to provide new campaign options for EC users in the future, as well as better tracking.

What kinds of ads will you NOT see?

Written on March 18th, 2009 by Graham

As we move closer to the day that we start accepting third party ads to run through the network, I want to re-iterate the bond of trust that Entrecard will now be sharing with its members going forward. You are trusting us with some of your ad space so that we might fund our operations and cash out your credits. We take this trust very, very seriously, and recognize that we only have one chance to get it right from the beginning.

I’m not sure exactly what types of ads we’ll see yet, but I do now what types of ads you won’t see. I can guarantee you, without a doubt, that you will NEVER see the following types of ads going through Entrecard:

• Male enhancement ads
• Adult themed ads
• Any ad that links to a site with nudity
• Gambling / Casino Ads
• Ads for drugs of any kind

In addition, we will be running the landing pages of ALL advertisers through CopyScape. We will not be accepting ads on behalf of anyone with scraped/stolen content.

If there are certain types of ads that you don’t want to see, ever, please let us know about it in the comments here. We listen to all feedback, and try our best to accomodate your wishes.

Does Entrecard cost money?

A few people seem confused on this issue, and I just wanted to take a moment to clear up something very important. Entrecard is a completely free service for bloggers. It always has been, and always will be. It costs you absolutely nothing to sign up an account, start earning credits, and start advertising. By “dropping your card” at other members’ blogs, you can earn up to 300 credits per day, for free, to advertise with. In addition, you will earn credits on a daily basis when you sell your ad spots for credits. You will earn 25 credits, once every three days, just for publishing on your blog. Finally, by selling any product or service in our market place, you can earn an unlimited amount of credits.

Yes, you can buy credits as well, but we encourage everyone to participate in our economy and earn credits for free instead of buying. Have you listed something in the market yet?

No credit fee to reject paid ads

Written on March 16th, 2009 by Graham

Guys n gals of Entrecard, there has been much controversy over the last few days regarding some proposed changes. Despite what has happened, I am very proud of each and every one of you. For you all to strongly share your feelings in some way, whether via blog posts, forum posts, comments here or via twitter, it humbles me that so many of you care. I appreciate all of your feedback.

As a direct result, and with the intention of moving forward as a team with the respect of our members, we wish to directly address your biggest concern with the new changes: having to pay a fee to reject paid ads.

We’ve listened to you loud and clear about the massive ad platform we’re launching, and over and over one piece of feedback kept popping up: “I don’t want a credit fee to reject ads!”

We were initially planning on charging a small fee to decline paid ads running through the network. The intent of this was to make sure that most ads run, while allowing you to reject ones you really don’t like.

But now it has become quite clear that as a community, you don’t agree with having to pay a fee, even if it’s just in the form of our virtual credits, to decline ads.

So, we have officially removed the planned credit-fee to reject. Rejecting any paid ad you wish will now be completely free when our new platform launches. As we move forward though, please understand that running these paid ads on your blog not only supports Entrecard, but also supports the entire virtual economy of Entrecard by providing the money needed to convert credits into dollars via our credit exchange that we are simultaneously rolling out.

I hope this has addressed all of your biggest concerns with the platform. I’d like to assure each and every member that we are here to work with you, not against you, and we listen at all times across all mediums.

“Above the Fold” rule officialy changed to “One Page-down” rule

Written on March 16th, 2009 by Graham

**UPDATE**

The one page-down rule will apply to screen resolutions of 1920×1200. This is the maximum screen resolution out of all Entrecard members, so there will be no one in the system who cannot place the widget within one page-down of their own personal screen and still be in violation.

Again, what this means is that no matter what your screen resolution is, you can place the widget within one page-down of your computer screen and be in compliance.

Greetings Entrecarders!

While a lot of the dust is still settling around our recent announcements, an important change has already been made.

The “Above the Fold” rule that we notified you we were implementing in a week’s time has now officially been changed to a “1 Page-down Rule.” What it means is that your widget should be placed withing one stroke of the page-down key.

It was immediately clear after our announcement that a strict “above the fold” mandate was not something that many members wanted to, or could, comply with. So, as a clear signal to you, our members, that we listen to all your feedback and incorporate as much of it as we can, we’ve gone ahead and decided on the change.

More exposure and traffic for all members

I’d like to take this opportunity to clarify for you in a succinct way exactly how this new “1 page-down” rule will effect your results with Entrecard specifically, as bloggers and entrecard advertisers.

Immediately, you should notice a decrease in your bounce rate. Whether it will be very slight or more significant is yet to be seen. However, it stands to reason that the only people clicking on low-placed entrecard widgets (which must now either be removed or moved within 1 page-down) are other Entrecard members, who may wish to drop and run.

With every widget in the network mandated to be placed high, your ads will reach the general audiences of every blog you advertise on, which should include many readers who are not Entrecard members. And we all know, if you’re not an Entrecard member, you can’t drop and run.

Thus, we anticipate a drop in the bounce rate as your ads across the board are exposed to wider audiences and run in better placements. We also anticipate that you will receive an increase from ad traffic. Although we will be taking as much as 50% of the impressions under the new system, the higher placement may generate more than 50% more clicks to make up for it. Again, this is all speculation, but we have very strong reasons to believe that the higher placement will reduce bounce rate and increase clicks, especially from non-Entrecard members.

The future of credits

Also wanted to take a quick moment to address one particularly disturbing concern. Some people seem to be under the impression that we’re doing away with our credit system. This is not true! Our credit system remains the life blood of the whole program. We’re merely providing an exchange for you to swap your credits for cash. You’ll still earn credits all the ways you currently earn credits, and you’ll still be able to spend them on advertising on any blog in the network, products and services in our shop, and giveaways for contests. This is not changing, and will never change. That is Entrecard.

We’re Launching a Third Party Ad Network and a Credit Cashout Service

Written on March 14th, 2009 by Graham

Greetings Entrecarders!

Today I have VERY important news for the entire Entrecard community. In approximately one week, we will be co-launching an Ad Network and a Credit Cashout Service. What this means, immediately to you, is the following:

The state of the economy

The state of the world’s economy is grim. We are in a global recession. People need simple ways to make money now more than ever before. Therefore, it became our imperative to turn Entrecard into a viable way for bloggers to make money. We think we’ve figured out a great way to do this. By allowing you to cash out your credits, and allowing you to earn credits by selling products and services in our market, advertising on your blog, publishing on your blog, and dropping cards, we’re making big moves to help you earn a second income.

In parallel, the Entrecard economy has been in a state of inflation since day one. Every day, more credits are created than are deleted. As of writing this, there are 44 million credits in the Entrecard economy, and we’re adding more each day. This is not sustainable, and so it has become clear that we need a more efficient way than advertising taxes to eliminate credits from the economy. The good news is that if this works, we’ll be able to lower the advertising tax.

So, by paying you cash for your credits, and then wiping them from the system, we estimate that we can delete as many as 1 to 2 million credits per day. This will immediately shift the economy into DEFLATION, which means your credits will become MORE valuable, instead of less valuable, both in their purchasing power and in their monetary value.

Finally, Entrecard has needed a solid revenue model since day one. We are excited to have settled on a viable revenue model that allows us to make money at the same time as passing on the majority of our revenues back to you. For any given day, we will take 75% of our revenues and pass them on to you by way of cashing out your credits. We will take the remaining 25% for ourselves to grow the business as a solid revenue source.

What if I don’t want these ads on my site?

We have always prided ourselves in being a service that offers you complete control over what does and does not appear on your site. Yet, at the same time, we’re forced to mitigate this ideal with our decision to launch a more traditional ad network, as a way to make you money, restore the economy to balance, and make some money for ourselves.

We will continue to allow you to reject any ad you wish. However, to reject ads from paying advertisers, you will need to pay a credit fee for each ad you wish to reject. We don’t know how much this will be just yet.

New Above-the-fold one page scroll rule

If this is going to work for everyone, we must also mandate an above-the-fold one page scroll rule. Thus moving forward, it is necessary for all Entrecard members place their widget within the top two pages of their site. This means what is immediately displayed when a site loads, and what is displays after scrolling down one complete screen. The rule won’t go into effect until we launch our ad network, which is about a week away, so please plan accordingly and make the necessary changes as soon as possible.

To recap

You can boil this down to the following 4 bullet points:

1. In a week, we’re launching an ad network where anyone can advertise through Entrecard widgets for CPM rates. This can be run of network advertising, or targeted by category. We are making available 50% of our inventory, or approximately 40 million monthly impressions.
2. With the money we make, we are going to buy credits back from you. You will be allowed to sell credits via your dashboard, and we will devote 75% of daily sales to buying credits back.
3. The economy will no longer be in a state of inflation, but rather in deflation which means your credits will gradually start becoming more valuable.
4. For all this to work, we must institute an above-the-fold rule, which goes into effect in a weeks.

Clean up Entrecard Contest! (24,500 Entrecard Credits)

Written on March 12th, 2009 by Andy T

The purpose of this contest is to get those bad blogs lingering around with Terms of Service or Blog Quality Standards violations out of entrecard.

Before we get started as to how you will enter and how the winner will be chosen and how the winner(s) will be rewarded…

You must dust off the old Terms of Service and Blog Quality Standards of Entrecard.

Please read them before continuing if you are not previously familiar.

To enter this contest you must:

1. Be an entrecard member.
2. Be familiar with the Blog Quality Standards and the Terms of Service.
3. Know how to report a user for a terms of service offense.

Now, lets go through this shall we.

1. http://www.entrecard.com – Register (If you not already a user)
a. Get approved (If you are not already approved)
2. Click the ‘Blog Quality Standards’ link above.
3. First you must find a blog that has something wrong.
a. In the case of auto-audio, not english, no recent content, etc. you would find their widget, and click the entrecard logo (will take you to their profile page) located on their profile page you will find thisAnd enter in the reason. This can be in the form of rule number, or your worded version of the violation.

4. Here is where it gets tricky. If you do not find a widget. Now, the best way to report a blog without a widget is to back track to their profile page. (If that is how you got there) however, if they have dropped on you and the only way to go is to follow the link to their site from your inbox, you must hover and wait for a name. (This will only work in the inbox rss feed on top of your dashboard. ) Then write down the title, and go to the campaign page, search for the blog’s title, go to their profile page and report them for ‘No Widget’.

Please before you send any reports. The ‘feedback’ function will not be counted. The valid entries must be Terms of Service reports. (Theres a huge difference)

So, what determines a ‘Valid Entry’? A valid entry is an offense that is persecutable by either “Warning” or a “Deletion”.

How will you be scored? Every ‘Warning’ counts as 1 point and Every ‘Deletion’ counts as 2 points.

The winners will be rewarded by the following in the order of highest points:

1. 10,000 Entrecard Credits
2. 5,000 Entrecard Credits
3. 2,500 Entrecard Credits
4. 1,000 Entrecard Credits
5. 1,000 Entrecard Credits
6. 1,000 Entrecard Credits
7. 1,000 Entrecard Credits
8. 1,000 Entrecard Credits
9. 1,000 Entrecard Credits
10. 1,000 Entrecard Credits

The contest will begin : Thursday, March 12th, 2009
The winners will be announced and rewarded: Thursday, March 19th, 2009.

Entries for the contest are only valid 3/12/09-3/19/09. Any and all reports of which are incorrect or spam entries will not be counted. The winner will be decided by totalling each user’s points as mentioned above.

Sponsored by:

The moderation team

Andy T – Get the most out of EC

Beth T – Ramblings of an undisturbed mind

Matt – RaginRev

Shaunalynn – The art and science of parenting

The goal of this contest is to raise awareness of the reporting abilities, raise awareness of the blog quality standards, and help us help you help the community as a whole.

Thank you and good luck.