Entrecard’s best idea (besides trying to change the price system. JC is almost off the most popular list, ridiculous) is the entrecard shop. However, the first batch of sellers were really lacking. The items consisted of worthless raffles that weren’t appealing at all. They were just more attempts at gaming the system trying to get credits. Some were selling tickets at something like 110 each, with only 10 tickets allowed. The prize was 1,000 credits. I wonder where the rest goes?

However the new batch of sellers, BAYB included, has offered some great items for sale, mostly at a reasonable price. Basically, I think we’ve scored so far. With our seller status I sold 4 125×125 banners for 1 week at 400 a pop. That’s 1600 credits earned in a week. These banners will be removed in the next couple of days, because their week is up. With those credits I’ve been able to “reinvest”.

The Entrecard Shop Loot

The thing about weekly, monthly, or yearly advertising is that it will be gone at some point. With the credits earned, I’ve been able to buy several blogposts that are permanent. It has driven little traffic to the site, but the reviews have been great and are tapping in to their audience.

Among blog reviews, I’ve been able to purchase ‘critiques’ as well as timed banner advertisements that cost way less than purchasing on their entrecard.

The two, possibly best, things are the guest posts I was able to purchase. Yes, I got to buy two posts that were used for BAYB and Words of a Poet. Brian wrote about his experience with interviews as easy content and traffic. It brought up the idea of starting interviews at BAYB again. Brian is still selling his guest posts for 400 credits. I think it’s an awesome idea, his posts are good too.

The other one was a “poem about anything”. This only cost my 75 credits and I was able to use it as a post at my poetry blog. The poem is entitled Monday Off and flows pretty well with the rest of the poetry on the site. Two posts for 475 credits, maybe I will just buy the rest of my posts? Or not.

What have you been able to buy from the entrecard shop?

There comes a time when every blog owner looks for the easy way out for their next post. You might be short on time or, even worse, running out of ideas. Regardless of your circumstances, posting an interview with an interesting subject is a really easy way to generate content and get traffic to your site.

I recently conducted a series of interviews with popular WordPress designers on my own web development blog. By choosing the right subjects and promoting the posts I was able to generate thousands of unique visitors to my site.

Here are some tips based on what I learned from my experience:

• Choose Your Subjects Wisely
  You obviously want to pick someone to interview that is involved with the topic of your site. That’s a no-brainer. But you need to do a little research before sending off your questions to just anybody. Are they willing to take the time to answer your questions at all? Are they popular enough in their field to warrant interest from readers? If someone is short on time they’ll give you equally short responses that won’t make for a good read. If your subject isn’t well-known you might get a great post but no response from the public.
• Let Others Promote Your Interview For You
  Remember that the whole point behind interviews is to generate high quality content and traffic with little effort on your part. So after the interview is done and posted let the web do the work of promotion for you. For my WordPress interviews, I posted each one to the graphic design and freelancing site Design Float and saw a flood of traffic as the interviews were voted to the front page. Find a social media site in your niche and get your interview links out there.
• Run Interviews Together In A Series
  If you interview a group of people in the same field you can get a lot of leverage out of each one by cross-promoting them. It’s also an incentive for people to come back to your site (or subscribe to your RSS feed) if you promise more interviews with similar subjects in the future. By mentioning previous interviews with each new one I posted I saw a nice waterfall effect with traffic.

Interviews are a really great way to provide high quality content to your visitors with a minimal amount of effort. Just make sure your subjects are in your field, well-known and willing to take the time to give you thorough answers to your questions.

As niche blogs become even more popular, the reliance on google for bloggers is at a new and different high. Much of the traffic for certain niche blogs come from search engines, mainly google. So when (and how much) does google crawl you?

SeoMeter

Add your website to SeoMeter, and start to keep track of search engine’s crawling!

SeoMeter allows you to monitor when search engine’s crawl your website or blog. Getting listed is free and the tool records in the database how often you get crawled.

You can see on our badge that our CC or crawl cycle is .9. The CC is the time between two consecutive crawls done by search engine robots. So if our crawl cycle was 1, that means we get crawled once a day.

You can also notice our rank, which I thought was pretty cool. You can check out the top 20 websites in blogging. Looks like we are in the top 5.

Why Does this Matter?

SeoMeter puts it simply and states that this

“allows webmasters to monitor their website’ crawling activities, and to collate crawling trend against their ongoing marketing campaign and other SEO strategies.”

However, I’m just more fascinated on graphs and how much the trends change over time. This gives you different things to check your experiments. Maybe you start posting more or less. It could affect your search engine referrals.

What determines search engine’s crawl rate is best outlined at the SEOmeter blog. The factors include content updates, pinging, sitemap, robots.txt and server speed.

How often do you get Crawled?

As bloggers expand their base to include other blogs, affiliates and merchandise, opportunities are endless. You can make “internet entrepreneur” your official job title, you just have to work at it. Lately I have been experimenting and making money with affiliate programs, however, is that enough?

Be Your Own Affiliate

The problem with affiliate programs is that you are promoting another website. If you don’t convert that or sell anything, then, it’s essentially free advertising. I’ve given TLA over 500 hits in the past months with no real conversions. Who wins? It’s not me!

How about starting your own e-store selling YOUR products? People make millions of dollars every year hitting the e-bay scene. You can too.

Buying Wholesale

If I had some investment money I’d definitely consider this. Purchasing wholesale clothes you can get designer labels. Buying it in a huge bunch of say 5,000 pieces of clothing, you get a low base rate. That way you can afford to resell your purchases cheap.

At MerchandizeLiquidators.com for example, they offer a package of men’s clothing. The brands include Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger. Price per piece works out to be about 7$, minimum 500 pieices. Your cost would end up being 3500$ if you purchased 500. Even if you just sold each peice for a dollar more you’d make 500$ profit. Many of the clothes can range from 25$ to 400$. The opportunity could be a lot more. Along with clothes, you could do toys, electronics and more.

Risk and Reward

The problem with this would be the risk you couldn’t market your own store. People want reliability when shopping online, I’ve hesitated purchasing online at stores I never heard of.

If worse comes to worse you could always unload your merchandise offline, like at an open market or swap meet.

Would you consider buying wholesale?

Blogging has been great this month, we’ve already earned a nice amount of cash, due to taking our ads privately. I hope to further monetize our blog with our same methods as well as incorporate some new things. I have given Project Wonderful a shot on our sidebar.

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 100 entrecard points.

Leave us a comment about anything you want. This week I’m particularly interested in how you monetize your blog. Is it strictly adsense? Or do you incorporate other advertising like affiliates? As always tell us what articles you’d like to see here on Blog about your Blog.

This week Comment Friday is brought to you by Sukosaki. Check out their First Blog Contest for 2008, looks like they only need a few more entries! Prize is a memory card by Panasonic.

A huge benefit of being ‘one of the A list’ is getting tipped off about launches of major websites before it happens. Obviously I’m not A-list yet, because I wasn’t tipped off (lol). With a great pre-launch, PepperJam has already gone viral by being picked up by several bigger blogs.

PepperJam Already the Best?

This PepperJam network has hit the affiliate networking scene hard. At least, the blogosphere.

All reviews have been positive as far as I’ve seen, and Zac Johnson (super affiliate money making machine) has even called it the, the Network of Networks.

Tons of Affiliates

The best thing, for me, that makes up if I want to work with an affiliate company is their variety of affiliates. You are going to want relevant affiliates that you can actually make money with. Not just tons of credit card offers and weightloss programs.

Pepperjam has just that, as well as keeping their bloggers in mind. Not only do they have big name clothes companies like BabyPhat and Phatfarm, there is also Review Me, SEOmoz.org , and TLA.

Ad Feature for Content

Google Adsense isn’t for everyone, including those who have been recently banned. Pepperjam brings you a solution for that. Pepperjam Ads!

Pepperjam ads convert your current affiliate partners into ads similar to those of Adsense and Bidvertiser. I’ve already begun running them in rotation with Adsense. This is what it looks like:

Other Benefits

A few other benefits that I like about the program is that the Pepperjam Network has its own affiliate program that pays out up to $7 per approved publisher application. I referred someone already and earned 5$. Remember this is an affiliate program so they will call you to verify your account. It’s easy and takes only a minute or two.

Pepperjam Network provides bi-weekly payments to affiliates. No more waiting 30+ days, in some cases months, for payment. I could definitely get used to payments all the time!

Pepperjam also offers a chatting system with affiliate representatives. This alone sets them apart as an affiliate system. With chatting the affiliate support is amazing. Any questions or concerns you have, if you catch them online, ask away. I got more information from Robyn over at Pepperjam via the chat system. I learned a few things and got to ask anything I wanted to.

So what are you waiting for? Join now

Mark wrote about Scratchback for us a while back, when it was starting to catch some steam. Since late November we’ve been displaying a top spots widget on our blog. Last night before going to sleep I received a nice email. It was my payment of 35.62$.

Scratchback vs Blogrush

It makes me curious when bloggers have a Blogrush widget and not a Scratchback widget. In weeks of having Blogrush I’ve seen very little traffic. With Scratchback I’ve actually received more traffic (from the scratchback directory listing) as well as earned 35$. Why not monetize a spot on your sidebar that isn’t generating any $?

Generate Traffic and “Tips”

A great and much needed feature was the creation of the scratchback directory. In the directory you can list your blog in up to 3 different categories. You can check out our listing in the directory. We listed our traffic and readership, hoping to entice tippers to spend their money here. This has already sent us several people who have purchased a Top Spot.

The directory has sent us about 50 visitors since we created our listing, a lot more traffic than I can say Blogrush ever sent us.

Our Tippers

I want to thank our tippers, several have purchased a spot more than once. We appreciate the support and hope we can send you even more traffic!

Fun little fact, our scratchback widget has been viewed over 30,000 times!