Entrecard is moving forward with bloggers. A huge percentage of bloggers are utilizing Entrecard as a traffic source, as well as a way to network. Entrecard is making new tools for bloggers to do that. They have just hit a homerun with their latest release, the entrecard toolbar, the Entrebar.

Entrecard Toolbar / Entrebar

The Entrebar has gotten me back into Entrecard. Sometimes I would drop if I felt like it, but now it has given me an easy way to browse new blogs.

The toolbar is full of features to make your Entrecard experience easy.

• Easily go to your dashboard, messages, and more
• Browse blogs in any category
• Browse blogs by any price (+more options)
• Jump from blog to blog, or open 10 windows
• Add a blog to your favorites with one click
• Advertise on a blog with just one click

The benefits of installing and using this toolbar was enough for me to upgrade to Firefox 3 to use it.

What has always been a problem for me is logging in to my account everytime. By logging into the entrecard toolbar I can stay logged in.

The toolbar also makes it a lot easier to spend those credits. Don’t go broke!

Have you downloaded the Entrebar?

I’ve noticed more and more bloggers are turning to affiliate marketing to make money online. Of course, a popular way to promote the affiliates is through blogging. Why not make that process easier?

Turn Keywords Into Affiliate Links

With WP Affiliate Elite you can simply choose a keyword that you’ve used on your blog and make it an affiliate link.

Here are some bonuses with using WP Affiliate Elite:

• Takes only a few minutes to install (very simple plugin)
• Hides your affiliate links to avoid losing commissions.
• Tracks each click making it easy to analyze which are the most profitable keywords/links.

Timesaving and No Follow

I hate backtracking on posts. Sometimes my affiliate links change and then I have to go back and fix them. If I’ve put the link several places, it can take a while to track down. With the plugin, you can do this all in one spot.

No follow is another problem I’ve had. The same thing with updating affiliate links, sometimes I have to go back and add no follow. With simply one click, you can add no follow to your links or affiliate links!

Price Check

The cost for this plugin is $47, accompanied with a 60 day money back guarantee. I generally have a hard time paying for a plugin (although I did buy OIOPublisher) but this particular plugin may just save you the time and effort to pay $ for it.

Buy and download the WP affiliate elite plugin

Take a look at the video in case I missed anything.

PerformancingAds everybody wins.

Performancing is taking that “everybody” thing seriously. No matter how big or small your blog is, you can sign-up for free. With PerformancingAds you can sell your empty banner spots.

PerformancingAds for Bloggers

Performancing Ads is kind of like the poor mans OIOPublisher. It provides you with a free alternative, as well as a “market”. This will send you potential buyers.

What is a bit unique about this, is it also has a banner exchange program. So it’s basically like entrecard, with the possibility of selling that ad space. Exchanging ads may be perfect for your banners that are getting clicks and whatnot, just no conversions. I’ll be working on this aspect throughout the day and will report my results.

PerformancingAds for Advertisers

To try to gain some new advertisers to the network, Performancing has a great promotion.

You can now take $25 off your first purchase of $100 or more.

Targeted Blog Advertising With PerformancingAds

PerformancingAds Affliate Program

The PerformancingAds affiliate program is definitely something worth participating in. You can earn $10 for each new publisher or advertiser you refer.

On top of that you earn 5% recurring revenue on all advertiser ad buys for life. As long as the advertiser you refer keeps buying, you’re set. $5 for every $100 they spend.

Make Money With PerformancingAds

Welcome back, dear BAYB readers! It’s time for some new and easy-to-win contest for you all. Let’s start!

Win Godaddy Gift Cards

Runts Life is giving away five $15 GoDaddy Gift card each over the next 5 weeks. You have many ways to gain points and increase your chances of winning: blog about this competition on your own blog, comment on any post on his blog, Digg/Stumble the contest post and subscribe to his RSS feed.

Win a garmin GPS

Win a Garmin nuvi 350 GPS navigation system sponsored by Market Leverage and tons of other fantastic prizes at MeAndMyDrum. Among the prizes is a free 125×125 banner ad for a month here at BAYB. See original contest post for details on getting entries.
Ends on August 15th.

Free Gas Gift Card

Three $50 Gas Gift Cards (or Amazon Gift Certificates) from MoneyNing. Many options to enter: comment, Stumble/Digg/Mixx the contest post, write a post about it, subscribe to his RSS feed by email and follow him on Twitter.
Ends on August a8th.

If you’re looking for blog contests, if you want to promote your own competition, don’t forget to visit About Blog Contests!

It’s contest time at Blog about your Blog again. This time we have one of the most interesting and creative contests we’ve ever done. It’s all about Jamie Kennedy.

Jamie Kennedy has tons of stuff going on and he is giving us some stuff to promote it.

First off he has a DVD release called Heckler. It’s a sort of documovie about heckling and experiences that people have gone through with it. You can watch the movie trailer on Youtube and preorder the DVD that is being released September 9th, 2008.

Jamie Kennedy also has their own awesome contest where you could win a trip to LA. The trip to LA includes meeting Jamie as his VIP guest on the set of Ghost Whisperer. And we know what that means… Jennifer Love-Hewitt! They are looking for video submissions, a total of 9 winners will be selected. Check out the Heckler contest for more details.

With that said, we have our own contest.

Rules and Entry

Entry is simple, just link to this contest as well as the Heckler contest from your website or blog. Of course encourage people to join both of them! We not only want this contest to be successful, we also want to promote Jamie Kennedy for the awesome prizes they have given us, to give away.

For a bonus entry, include his DVD release on Amazon (preorder now!).

Writing about both contests is 1 entry, including the DVD release will give you an addition entry. Winners will be chosen raffle style, the more entries you have the better.

Update For an additional bonus entry, vote for the contest at Contest Live.

Make sure to leave a comment on this post stating that you’ve entered. Otherwise your entry may not count.

Prizes

Three people will win an exclusive Jamie Kennedy package. Each package includes

• A cap
• A dogtag
• Unwashed DVD
• Photo of Jamie

Each item is signed by Jamie Kennedy!

As a consolation, we will also be giving away 10 keychains just for fun.

The prizes can only be shipped to the US. The contest will end at Monday August 18th, 2008 11:59 pm PST

Triple.com is a hosting company that offers their hosting service for only $3.99 (lowest I’ve seen in a while), as well as gives you an alternative place to register domains. We reviewed Triple.com almost a year ago. It’s a good time to revisit them.

Triple the Thoughts

As in my last review, the domain is great, if thats all you see. The website looks a lot better as they have more services, tools, and a better overall site.

New Affiliate Program

This time what’s new is their affiliate program. There are plenty of hosting affiliates, which can be a bit boring. Nearly every blog promotes a host, because the payout is so huge. However the conversion rate is generally extremely low. So why use Triple.com’s affiliate program?

What pisses me off about Godaddy and the other hosting/domain registrars, is that they don’t give you crap when you refer someone to them and they simply buy just a domain. They actually deactivated my Godaddy affiliate account since my only leads were domain sales.

Triple.com is offering up to 30% of all the payments made by the customers you refer, apparently regardless of the sale. A $10 domain register, is going to (according to this) $3. Now thats not huge or anything, but $3 more than you could get elsewhere.

Of course thats not all they offer, hosting, SSL certificates and more. The minimum payout for each affiliate is only $20.

Refer Your Friends

On top of the money you can earn by referring people to Triple.com. There is money to be made by referring webmasters to the affiliate program. Join now and start referring your friends. You can earn up to 15% of what they earn.

The affiliate program is open to everyone, it took me a minute to sign-up and I was accepted.

Payments are made by paypal, which is a huge plus for me. However since the affiliate program is so new, there currently aren’t many promotional tools (banners) to use.

I like to follow the sales of blogs, I find it interesting. We blogged about Blogging Fingers getting sold a while back. The blog on the block this time was Bloggin-Ads. Mike has become a friend and contact over instant messaging since his blog has emerged. Lately he has fallen on some hard times.

I hate seeing a blogger down, so I did my best to help his sale along. I thought now that his blog has sold it would be a great thing to interview him.

If you missed the sale, he recently sold his blog for $5,000, expecting a lot more (as did I). He cited other blogs being sold.

http://onemansgoal.com sold for $10,000
http://cashquests.com sold for $15,000
http://johncow.com sold for $25,000
http://bloggingexperiment.com/ sold for $15,000
http://bloggingfingers.com sold for $6,000
http://www.blogohblog.com/ sold for $10,000

According to this list, his blog was definitely valued at about 15-20k in my opinion. Whoever got it, definitely got a steal in my opinion.

I interviewed Mike Huang to see what went wrong.

Was selling your blog harder or easier than you thought?

Yeah, it was actually a lot harder to find bidders and potential buyers than I thought. I really thought I would receive bids up to $10,000, but that was out of the picture. Not to mention, the sale was hard on my wife and I especially after all the hard work put into it.

Why don’t you think you got the price you wanted?  The long term advertising promises? Or something else?

From what I’ve been told, it is because of the long term advertising. What I should’ve done was not mention that, just receive bids, and if it goes high enough, I would just refund all the advertisers. I believe I could’ve gotten a least $7,000 or $8,000.

Another problem is the domain, which has a dash in it, which could cause problems with SEO, but not too much.

You mentioned the sale at Mybloglog, Blogcatalog, and Twitter. I also saw it on a lot of forums, which ones? What do you think drove the most bidders?

I mentioned it EVERYWHERE (mybloglog, blogcatalog, twitter, etc). Digital Point, Bloggeries, and NamePros. The most bidders most likely came from twitter or from other bloggers that mentioned it (hopefully BAYB!)

What did you learn from the sale?

What I learned is that you should never expect too much from selling ANYTHING because it may come out different than expected.  A sale is much harder than what it seems and actually requires a lot of work.

Anything else we should know? Is the sale for $5,000 finalized?

It’s pretty much finalized and it’s in progress on escrow.com right now. Another thing to mention is that Escrow.com is the safest way to sell a site. Depending on the amount, if it goes over a few thousand, a seller should use escrow.

My Insight

The advertising slots that were already promised seemed to be the downfall, there were also other negative comments in sale thread.

A few pointers by observation when selling a blog:

• Tie up future advertising. I generally don’t like to sell a year in advance lately, but I have as of late.
• Along with advertising tie up any lose ends to make you look bad. Mike still had an open contest that wasn’t finalized which caused problems.
• Don’t change the blog around, keep the theme and posts going regular so the bidders can see how the blog functions and won’t take over with nothing left.
• Offer to stay on as a paid blogger to keep the “face” of the blog there, if possible.
• Lastly, this goes for Mike, don’t redirect the URL to another site in the closing hours of your auction!

Any other questions you have for Mike that I missed I’m sure he’d be happy to answer!