First of all, Happy Easter to all BAYB readers! Hope you have a great time. Are you ready for new blog competitions? It’s simple and easy, as always. All you need is your blog and a bit of luck…

$25 from AlosBlog

You can win $25 at AlosBlog. To enter do either (or all) of the following things: subscribe to his RSS Feed (by mail or reader) and write a blog post about this contest linking to the site homepage. Winner will be selected randomly.
Ends on April 6th.

1 Year of Free hosting

Your chance to gain free hosting (worth $95.40) for one entire year. It’s the new prize offered by Contestu.com, a great site to find blog contests. You can gain points by doing the following things: subscribe to his RSS feed and send him the secret code (+3), subscribe to his RSS feed by mail (+5), write a post about this contest using a related anchor text (Blog Contests, Contests, Win Prizes, Win Stuff, etc) and linking to the contest page (+10), leave a comment and tell what you have done (+1).
Ends on March 28th.

1000 Entrecard Credits

An interesting amount of Entrecard Credits from the Digital Lounge. To enter you have many options: subscribe to his RSS feed by email, fave the blog on Technorati, Stumble upon any of his blog posts, blog about Digital Lounge or any of his posts with a linkback to the homepage.
Ends on March 31st.

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

I found a new site, Homepagle, that has the makings for being an interesting way to market your website or blog. If your sneaky, like me.

Create Your Homepage

When I first visited this website it was one of the moments. Those moments in which you tell yourself “Why Didn’t I Think of That?” Then I began to think how I could use this to help me. When creating your own homepage you can upload an image if you want to. It’s basically Google with a customizable feature.

Why not upload a banner promoting your website or blog? This may not impact anything if you just use it for your own homepage, but think bigger. By putting a network of computers as that it can be effective. Another great way to advertise your website for free!

Now all they need now is to put your own “favorite” links and websites and rss feeds. Add my homepagle as your homepage!

It’s been hard to find time to blog! However I’ve been able to manage to keep updated. With starting more and more new blogs I find myself blogging almost 24/7.

If this is your first Comment Friday we give one lucky person a free weekly blogroll spot as our “blog of the week“. Along with that we are also giving that winner 200 entrecard credits.

With the launch of my newest blog, My Recipe Stash, I can’t imagine doing another. If you were to start another blog, what would it be about? What niche would it be?

We know how I started blogging, I’ve told the story a few times. I got several wonderful comments of bloggers telling their story of how they started blogging I wanted to share them to everyone.

Blogging Stories

Rhys

I started blogging nearly 6 years ago. The main reason was to surpress an ego trip I was having. I was reading in a magazine all about blogging and how a lot of them were rubbish. I was like “I’ll show you, I’ll start a blog”. Six years later I’m still going.

I had a period of about 3 months off blogging, and I changed blogs because I wanted a fresh start, but I’m still here.

Laura

I started blogging in 1999. I was inspired by a lot of blogs which were mostly done by people who knew how to code in notepad backwards, just kidding about the backwards part.

They were beautiful and amazing feats of HTML. Blogger was pretty much unknown then. The only software was what people came up with themselves. I think there was DiaryLand and LiveJournal, not 100% sure if they were a bit later or not. Anyway, I started blogging cause I wanted to create art online. Art being the blog itself as well as the contents.

Sampath

Before I started blogging, I knew that there is a possibility to earn money through it. But I believe that if you only blog for money, your blog won’t be a successful one. You must provide valuable information for others while earning an income, like this blog does. I started my blog on January of this year and gathering attention of the people now.I’m enjoying it and working hard to maintain it’s quality while generating an income. I’m still having a poor monthly income. Hope that it will increase in the future.

Esofthub

I started blogging in Sept ‘06 because I wanted to learn more “blogging” and this new thing called “Web 2.0.” I posted my “web finds” and “My SysAd” blogs on Rhys’ toplist and then things sort of went from there.

Ami

It’s been one year… a little bit more. I was frustrated with the crime in our country (South Africa) and just after our own personal run in with criminal elements, I started blogging, about misc stuff, but mostly about news (especially crime news).
Didn’t make me an optimist, but it was a place to express your thoughts about the future.

Sorry if I left you out. If I continue to keep getting these great blogging stories of how you got started I’d love to continue posting them.

How did you start blogging?

We’ve written about scratchback several times. One because we like it. Two because we are still making money with it. At first I thought scratchback would only last so long, but it continues to surprise me.

Earnings from Scratchback

Yesterday I received another payment from scratchback totaling almost $27. I thought that was pretty good, considering I run scratchback on two of my blogs. The tips are for $2 and $1. That means quite a few people are leaving me tips.

My overall total tips (that I’ve been paid) are at $91.35.

How To Get More Tips

I’ve given out my tips for scratchback before, but in case you missed them here they are again.

Post about Scratchback. This one is a given an easy to do. This alerts your regular readers and new visitors about the widget.

Register to the Scratchback Directory. The directory is a great tool for scratchback. A lot of people search the directory for blogs to ‘tip’.

Ask For a Plug on the Scratchback Blog. It couldn’t hurt, the post about our blog definitely helped with tips.

Offer Incentive to Tippers. One of our authors is offering a button for tippers. Some are giving t-shirts etc.

Promote Your Widget. I’m not sure how much this has helped, but I’ve included a mention about our widget on our rss feed.

Also, remember when leaving tips, to be careful advertising, literally!

Buy Our Links

Don’t forget to leave us a tip. It’s only $2 per tip! Our scratchback widget has been viewed over 80,000 times!

Linkbait has become a popular way for bloggers to increase their readers and traffic.

What is Linkbait?

Linkbait is basically a piece of content placed on a web page that is designed for the specific intention of gathering links from as many different sources as possible. Many linkbaits are also designed to go viral or go be popular on social media sites.

Good linkbait can be gold for any blogger or webmaster.

My Linkbait

Recently I tried my own linkbait, 8 reasons to link to our blog today. I wouldn’t say it failed because we did get some links (which I definitely appreciate). However it wasn’t as many as I had hoped.

It was a simple idea that I thought might spark some interest, especially to our regular readers. We did gain several rss subscribers along with a few links.

Why Did Your Linkbait Fail?

There could be several reasons why your linkbait failed.

Not Interesting Enough. The post just didn’t serve it’s purpose as linkbait. Whether it was simply boring or not eye-catching, the post or image just didn’t work.

Couldn’t Go Viral. For whatever reason your post couldn’t go viral. Maybe it wasn’t the right topic or submitted to the wrong websites. It’s important to put it on the best sites possible depending on the category.

No Promotion. Most linkbait definitely needs promotion, at least to get going. You need those votes and views for people to actually SEE the linkbait. This would be a good method for all I’ve written about on Social Media like Sending Stumble Requests to your Friends.

Viral but No Links. Sometimes posts go viral and go popular on digg and more, but you don’t get people writing about it. Another linkbait I’ve written, Top 10 Reasons to Sleep Through New Years Eve, went popular on digg and others, but didn’t get people linking to it.

Social Media Didn’t Like It. You can have a great posts, a few votes, but not enough. Sometimes I’ve had over a dozen stumbles on an article, but only a small trickle of traffic. It often depends on WHO votes for it, instead of how many.

It’s Been Done Before. It’s hard for people to be into something that they’ve actually just seen, or seen before. It’s almost like “copying” to people. Digg’ers are the hardest to please when it comes to that sense. If you do anything even similar to what they’ve seen before you post will likely get buried.

Have you ever written linkbait? What were the results?

Hey ya’ll! Delores Defacto, here. I wanted to contribute my blogging plight:

Apparently I’ve been blacklisted from Sphinn.

I set up an account, after seeing that sites such as Blog About Your Blog used it as an alternative for Digg. I added only a few links that I can remember, some for other websites, some of my own but after a few weeks I could no longer log into my account.

I tried the “forgot your password” option at the login page but no emails were ever sent back. Sphinn never, I repeat, never, contacted me regarding my account. I just couldn’t log in.

I had gotten emails from a couple other link networking sites such as Newsvine and Simpy saying that I can’t add my own links as favorites. Fine. No problem. I deleted my own blog links and replied to each email with, “Sorry about that. I didn’t know.”

With Sphinn, after time after unsuccessful time to retrieve my password, I set up a new account that worked fine for a day. Then I couldn’t log into that account either. I finally used the contact form to email my direct question, “I can’t log into my account. Can you send me a reset password?”

Here’s the response I got:

Hi, Your account was terminated for submitting off-top spam. Sphinn is an internet marketing website and only accepts on-topic and high quality news.
Regards, Rob Kerry, Sphinn Editor

I then replied to this email asking:

Interesting. I’ve never submitted any kind of spam. What exactly are you considering spam? I’m very confused about this.
Thanks for the help.

That was five days ago. I still haven’t received any response back from him, or anyone else at Sphinn

I’m writing this article because I’m really curious as to how often this happens with their service. Matthew, our well known Blog About Your Blog resident, said that he has never had any problems with the system, nor has heard of anyone else coming into such account shut down and dismissal.

I am in no way a spammer and, honestly, I wouldn’t even know how to fill any link network with spam ads. I don’t know if they’re considering my own blog post links as spam but a simple explanation and contact about the situation, so that I can remove these links (if that is what they’re basing this problem on) can be removed so I can continue using their service.

I even went as far as to add Sociable to my site so I could add a Sphinn button to each of my posts and look what kind of thanks I get.

Delores