Entrecard Update
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I’ve been messing around with Entrecard on this blog since November or December and overall the system has worked. It brings traffic, even though the traffic is not really good. A few weeks ago Entrecard modified its method for generating ad prices. If you have anything to do with Entrecard then I’m sure you understand it but just incase I’ll recap. Originally the ad price was calculated by taking the average number of drops over the past 5 days on a blog and multiplying it by two. This gave you a price. This system was okay, but what it meant is the highest priced blogs where not necessarily the best performing. This was direct result of the fact that people who dropped more received more drops and as a result their prices went up and stayed up.
The system was changed so the price to advertise is based on supply. So the more people who want to advertise on a blog, the higher the price. Now overall I think this is fair. But there are some items I don’t like about the new system. The first is all the blogs are really high priced, even ones that don’t perform. Before I could grab spots on blogs in the 20-40 credit range and get fairly decent ROI from those blogs. The price was cheap enough that I could buy a lot of ads and keep them running all the time. That’s pretty much impossible now. Earlier I wanted to purchase some ads and I did not even look at any over 128 credits. Most of the ones I looked at did not look to be one that would bring me any clicks or not very many. I went through 1000 credits in just a couple of minutes. Now I have the credits because at first I dropped a lot of cards and i never spent as many credits as I earned. So I have over 20K in credits in my account. It took a lot of dropping for me to build those credits and I don’t want to blow them all on a few days advertising.
For this reason I’m seriously considering just giving up on Entrecard. I just don’t have the time to drop every day like crazy and without doing that then I don’t see how I can make this worth my time. At one time I could drop on weekends to the amount of credits that where allowed and then throughout the week on my favorites and have plenty of credits to keep my blog out there on numerous sites everyday, but there is no way I would be able to do that now. I’m going to need to decide if I want to keep this up or just offer a contest for all my credits and spend my limited time on other methods of promotion.
Yahoo to Run Google Ads
Deal Book is reporting that Yahoo will run a trial of Google Adsense for Search on a small percentage of its search results. The move is reported to be an attempt at raising shareholder value and to allow Yahoo to demand more money from Microsoft with its bid for Yahoo.
Am I the only one who finds this weird? Yahoo has its one search platform and while it has not caught on in the industry like Google Adwords has it is a competitor to Adwords. I will admit that I don’t have a lot of experience with Yahoo Ads. I was accepted into the program early on and I ran it a little on a couple of sites, but the ads where not really relevant to the content on those sites so I removed it and put Adsense back on those sites. It appears really the main people this program has been able to attract and keep are those who have been removed from the Adsense program for what ever reason. Regardless of my lack of experience with Yahoo, this just seems like bad business. Why would they pump up revenue for a competitor. Perhaps decisions such as this are why they have put themselves in the position to be acquired in the first place. Maybe Yahoo should take Microsoft’s offer since it seems they don’t have the talent needed to run their own business.
I personally think this acquisition will help the marketers on the net, especially those of us who derive revenue from contextual based ads. Right now Google is the leader in this area and as a result are able to set the tone for the market. More competition in this area will possibly mean a higher cut of advertising revenue for the people who actually generate the revenue. Microsoft has not made a lot of progress with its ads program, but combining both what MS has and what little progress Yahoo has made, should require Google to offer more incentive to prevent publishers from jumping ship.
Of course there is also the chance the merger will allow Microsoft to regain some ground in this area. Microsoft has a habit of being late to the game with these types of items and then pulling out ahead and crushing the competition. With the additional eyeballs the Yahoo properties will give MS, they may be able to start their road to dominance on the net. Guess we’ll just need to wait and see what happens.
Yuwie Make money Social Networking site
I’ve seen this around for a while, but I just got around to actually signing up for an account. Yuwie is a social networking site much like MySpace of Facebook, but this site actually allows you to earn a portion of the revenue your traffic generates for the site. This is not a new concept as it has been done before with varying websites and programs. I think one of the main difference with Yuwie is people actually get paid. I’ve talked to a few of my associates who are already generating several hundred dollars a month with the service and they have only been in a couple of months. Of course I can’t promise you will do the same, but if you can build up a decent team then who knows.
I figured I would give this a shot. I’ve got a few ideas for generating some leads. One of which is posting here. Yes those are affiliate links and if you join through one of them you will be come part of my team. There are some fairly savy marketers jumping on board here and there will be resources coming down the pipe to help people with attracting new members.
I’m betting most people who are reading this already have a built up profile that can be used to start building your team. It was just a year or so ago that MySpace was all the rage and many people where earning a lot of affiliate revenue from their friends list on MySpace. Well Myspace started cracking down and it got tough to send out your broadcasts. Well perhaps many of you still have some of those MySpace accounts. That is prime ground for attracting people to your team as Yuwie has many of the same features as MySpace and Facebook has. Plus wouldn’t it be great to give all your friends an avenue to actually earn a little of the money the generate for MySpace and Facebook. After all what do you have to lose? Setting up an account is free and it is really easy to use. There is a video that will explain exactly how it works so you cna make up your own mind. While the money you can earn initially won’t be a lot, but I would bet if you had just one MySpace account with a 100 friends then you would be able to improve those initial numbers in a hurry. What do you have to lose but a little time? Watch the video now.