Day 10 - earning Entrecard credits

I also wanted to mention earning entrecard credits from the forums in entrecard. Check any forum that sounds like marketing and promotions. Bloggers will pay you to comment, stumble and/or digg their posts. Since commenting on other peoples blogs is a great way to build links and gain traffic anyway, I watch for these offers and frequently hop on them.

Day 9 - just joining social networks - blog catalog, stumble upon, digg

I continue to drop around 20 to 30 entrecards. Additionally, I’m resubmitting this blog to blog catalog. Last time it was rejected because it was too new.

I’ve also joined Digg (HalfFullCup) and StumbleUpon (xmarks1). There are forums on entrecard and blog catalog where you can trade diggs and stumbles. I did that for awhile and got a little traffic but it made me feel dirty. It wasn’t honest traffic. I’m going to build my friends databases on both Digg and Stumble a bit before I try to get traffic. I believe the best way is to Digg and Stumble anything you think is cool as you search the web. Also link to as many people as you find interesting on both networks. After you have built up a good list of friends (more than 30 active members – check to make sure that they are actually digging and stumbling – it won’t help you if they really don’t use the system) and then post you best post. You can call your friends attention to it on both sites. If they like it their activity will bring more people’s attention to it. So for now, I’m just going to build my own activity.

Day 8 - Avatar

If you are having difficulty creating an avatar for entrecard and other site. Check out bloggers such as http://househomegarden.blogspot.com/. This site others free avatars. There are other bloggers out there that are willing to help. Search "free 125" or "free avatars" and several should come up.

Day 7 - entrecard continued

I'm up to 350 visitors. What I have done over the last several days is to drop around 20 to 30 cards at entrecard members a day and advertise. I find the fastest way to do this is by clicking only on those from my drop inbox. I have posted a few items in the entrecard forums and earned some extra credits by commenting on other blogs. Go into the forums and look into marketing and promotions forums. People are willing to trade credits for traffic. I then use the traffic to purchase ads. I only purchase ads with 16 ec or more. I think those that are worth less are probably not active blogs and stay away from them.

Day 6 – Entrecard

I haven’t done much in terms of promoting this site in the last couple of days and my traffic is around 10 a day. What I did do is join entrecard.com. Basically you need a 125 by 125 pixel image (called a widget) and an email address. Sign up and put entrecard’s code on your blog. Other entrecard members will sign up to advertise on your site, which earns you credits. You can pay credits to advertise on other entrecard member’s sites. Additionally, you can earn credits by viewing entrecard member’s sites and “drop”ping a card on them. That mean you clicked on a button marked drop. Each time you drop, you earn a credit and the site you dropped on earns a credit.

So far, I’ve dropped 43 times, mainly on the same 10 blogs. I have been dropped on 38 times. Some people drop like crazy and drop up to the limit, 300 per each of your blogs. From this blog, I only drop 10 to 15 a day. That only takes a couple of minutes. Most people you drop on will try to drop on you too. It builds a repeat traffic pattern. I purchased advertising which is just kicking in today and have earned 2 clicks. Prime advertising opportunities require a wait, so the ones I purchased won’t kick in for a couple of days.

To earn extra credits, I logged into the entrecard forum and reviewed the promotion/marketing groups. Some people will pay you credits to comment on their site. I did a couple of those today but I haven’t been paid yet. When I do, I will buy more advertising. I don’t normally waste credits on cheap advertising (which everyone in the beginning is cheap) but if anyone comments here and joins entrecard, let me know. I would be happy to be your first advertising customer.

I wanted to mention something I did on my other blog. I wrote a post about my daughter’s diaper training, then I started a couple of discussions titled “she peed on my floor and I had to cheer.” I included a link to my post. The title was interesting enough that I got people jumping over right away. Almost immediately, I had a dozen people from the forums reading my post.

Day 5 - google trends, insights for search

Basically no one visited today but that isn’t surprising. I have family visiting so I didn’t do much yesterday and did nothing today. I didn’t visit those who commented on my posts. Since I don’t have a readership or reputation yet, backing off promoting your blog will result in a major reduction in visits. My other blog (www.inandoutoftruth.blogspot.com) had 90 visits one day last week and I doubt I’ll break 30 today. It is suffering from the same lack of attention this week.

Let me throw out one tip. Visit Google trends (www.google.com/trends). It will show what search terms are growing in popularity. Google Insights for Search (www.google.com/insights/search/#) is a related site the does something similar. Review what searches are more popular. If you are deciding about a couple of different topics to write about or really are just looking for ideas, write about something that is growing in popularity. That way, you may be able to ride some of the growth in interest. Right now according to Google trends, C. familiaris, Bill Gwatney and Colin Powell are hot trends. In Google insights for search, I am able to focus on just the United States (for example) and a period of time. According to this site myspace, youtube and yahoo are the highest rated search terms. What is really cool about insights for search is that you can focus on categories. One category is online communities. By looking at that category, facebook is the leading search term by a major factor but hi5 is growing incredibly fast. Any of these would be great topics to write a post about and hope that you would be able to earn some of the growing interest.

Tonight, I’m just going to post this blog. Ping my blog and then visit the people who commented yesterday. I really won’t get much of a chance to promote beyond that.

Day 4 - traded links and turned down by blogcatalog

It’s a day later and I had 28 visitors. I’m pretty pleased. I had forgotten that blog catalog requires that blogs be up and running for a minimum time before being accepted, therefore this blog was rejected from BC for the time being. I did post several introduction comments on BC using my other blog. If your blog has been around for a little while to sign up and friend me (my profile is xmarks).
I also traded several links. It’s been a long day and I’m quitting early. I’ll post this and ping my blog.