EntreBlast

Archive for May, 2009

Two weeks down, two more to go. I am testing Adgitize, an advertising platform for bloggers, to see how it performs. Here are the results for week two:

Advertising

The numbers are down a bit and I think that’s because there are more advertisers out there, which means my ad gets shown less.

Points Earned

I’ve been getting 10 less points in the page view points section a lot more lately, which kind of sucks when it puts me just 10 points short of the 300 mark.

Money Earned

Now, because I have hit days where I earned 290 points compared to 300, my earnings are drastically lower, which REALLY sucks. 10 points makes a huge difference. With 290 points, I earned around 20 cents but with 300 points I earn 40 to 50 cents. That’s a big difference.

Week 1 Earnings: $4.09

Week 2 Earnings: TBD

Total Earnings: $6.33

If I want to reach my goal of $14 in a month’s time, I should be at $7 in earnings but remember there is a two day delay for earnings results, so I still am missing two days this week to account for. I probably am at the $7 mark and so hopefully I will reach at least $14 in earnings. We’ll see!

A couple months back, Entrecard imposed changes to the credit system by adding a 12.5% tax on Entrecard credits and limiting the amount of ECs users can transfer to others daily and weekly. Though the intentions of these changes are good – the goal is to eliminate the selling of ECs outside the system – it has been hurting Entrecard and the community.

It’s pretty noticeable how much contests have died down. In fact, I haven’t come across an Entrecard contest in weeks. I was finally truly affected when I was setting up the process for allowing people to order paid posts on EntreBlast and noticed that the cost would not go above 999 ECs. So, I sent a letter to Entrecard’s support e-mail which will hopefully make it to Graham.

The letter read:

Hey Graham,
I posted this on the forum but have received no response. Can you please lift the EC trading limits? Now that users can sell their Entrecard credits through Entrecard, there isn’t any reason to have limits on transferring ECs. People can sell their credits back to Entrecard, credit farmers aren’t really problems these days.

Lifting the EC transfer limits would bring back contests without the annoying hassle of having to contact admin to arrange it for them. Have you noticed that there aren’t big contests anymore? Holding contests was a great benefit to Entrecard and would surely sprout life back into the community feel.

Additionally, I can’t charge more than 999 ECs for ads or paid posts on my blog via OIOPublisher. This is ridiculous considering people pay 2,000+ ECs for a one day ad through Entrecard, why not allow them to pay more than 999 ECs for one month ads, or a featured post on a blog. I understand you are concerned about people selling their credits outside of Entrecard, but I think the priorities need to be adjusted here. What’s more important: trying to keep people from selling and buying credits from people other than Entrecard, or pleasing the members that essentially form Entrecard.

I miss contests, and I know everyone else does too. The ‘Contests’ forum is completely dead now. It would be a logical decision to lift this EC cap. You’re already hindering the transfer of ECs by having a tax. I understand you want to take ECs out of the system, lifting this trade limit would actually HELP with that goal. See, people win a lot of ECs through a contest, and they’ll probably want to sell them for money. Of course now they are able to sell it back to you guys (credit farming is DEAD and they know they can get banned for selling them outside Entrecard).

At this point, Entrecard is in need of some change to spark enthusiasm and interest back into Entrecard. This would be a wise move and I hope you see that too. I have posted this e-mail to my blog and if you watch the post, you’ll see the response of other Entrecard members.

Sincerely yours,
Casey
www.entreblast.com

I’m interested in your input, so please comment on this post. I believe we can get this limit removed so we can bring contests back to Entrecard.

Excuse us for a moment. Looks like we’re experiencing some techncial difficulties on EntreBlast. None of the internal links are working. Clicking to view comments, older posts, categories, pages, anything. None of them are working. If you click on a link, it’ll give you a ‘Not Found’ page.

I have no idea why all of a sudden this is happening but I’ll update this post when it’s fixed. I’m working to get this problem solved. Hang tight, and sorry for the problems!

Update: Everything’s working again!

I’ve had Adgitize on my blog for a week now and have some pretty interesting results to share with you guys. For those who don’t know, I am doing an experiment with Adgitize, an ad platform for blogs, to see if I can make money with it and get traffic to my blog. I have placed one Adgitize ad in my sidebar, and a grouping of nine ads in my footer in order to have the maximum potential to receive points which will then be converted to cash.

Advertising

On Saturday afternoon I purchased to place my ad in the Adgitize network to run for a full month for just $14. I was really pleased with my results in just half a day and throughout the entire week, I’ve received great numbers.

Points Earned

The first day with Adgitize I earned a measly 169 points. But, this was because I started halfway through the day, and I wasn’t an advertiser. With being an advertiser, I automatically receive at least 100 points. Here’s a table with my points earned for each day. The days that are noticeably lower are days I didn’t post on EntreBlast. It’s difficult to post every single day with new and quality content. I’m not going to just try and pump out a new post every day, even if it’s crappy, just to get some points. I won’t damage the quality of my blog for a few extra cents. Plus, when you get to the table of my earnings, you’ll see that the difference between days I’ve posted and days I didn’t post is not that large.

Money Earned

Here’s the good stuff people. Those points mean nothing if they aren’t converted to cash. Here’s how much I’ve made this week via the points I’ve earned. Unfortunately, the earnings aren’t reported until two days later, so the results for Thursday and Friday aren’t out yet. I’ll include those earnings in next week’s post and then I’ll be able to give an official “Earnings from Week One” tally. My earnings basically depends on the percentage of points I earned that day versus the whole network.

As you can see, I’ve earned around 50 – 70 cents each day since becoming an advertiser. This is a nice plus to being an advertiser. As long as I earn on average 50 cents a day, I’d make $15 in 30 days. That looks to be pretty manageable even after just one week of results.

Look for next week’s results or just subscribe to EntreBlast!

So, yesterday I get up and do my normal routine online – checking e-mails, checking on EntreBlast, and responding to comments left on EntreBlast. Wait a second! Well, while I was responding to a comment left on a post, I noticed my subscriber count only showed 19 subscribers. Woah there! How could this possibly be true?

That’s a 72% decrease to my normal 60 – 68 subscribers. Now, I know I didn’t have 40 people unsubscribe overnight (why would they?) so I went over to feedburner.com and checked my stats. Here’s what the chart looked like:

Now, at first glance everything looked normal. Usually, if my subscriber count is unusually low for one day it’s because Google’s feedfetcher usually fails to report. However, in comparison to the pie chart of the day before, a huge chunk of the pie chart is actually missing. Google doesn’t account for most of my RSS subscribers. Instead, feedburner’s RSS by e-mail subscriptions do. And that was what was missing from yesterday!

It’s important to always make sure everything is functioning properly and if not, investigate why. Also, if you’re feedburner count was really low yesterday, or if you’re feedburner count is every abnormally low for the usual, then go to feedburner.com and check the stats. Usually, it’s not your fault if this happens!

In other, EntreBlast-related news, I have enabled threaded comments so I and you guys can reply to comments.

Saturday, I said I was going to have a “casual experience” with Adgitize. However, if I really want to make money with Adgitize and truly see it’s potential, I’m going to have to try a little harder than that. The more work you put into something, the bigger the output you’ll receive. I’ve noticed a lot of similarities with Adgitize to Entrecard, so I’m going to treat it like Entrecard.

My goal is to earn at least 300 points per day with Adgetize. 100 points will come from writing a new post every day. I don’t think I’ll be able to write a new post every single day, so some days will have slightly lower earnings.

Another 100 points will come from clicking on other Adgitize ads.

Additional points will come from page views and ad views. I’ve added the maximum amount of ads I can plan on my blog.  You may not notice it, but besides the one ad I have in the sidebar, I have another grouping of nine below my footer. So, I’ll be earning the max amount of points I can from this, and my sidebar isn’t cluttered! My points from page views and ad views combined will total nearly 100 points each day. These will come in handy to make up for days I don’t post.

My final 100 points will come from advertising with Adgitize. Buying advertising on Adgitize is extremely cheap – only $14 for a month. And advertisers earn 100 points a day just for being an advertiser! Plus, by sending more traffic to my blog, I’ll be earning more points from page and ad views.

Not only will I be making money, but I’ll always be getting traffic to EntreBlast – two key things I definitely want! Maybe I’ll even earn enough money to offset the advertising cost. If so, it would be a huge benefit. Expect an update by the end of this week with information about points I’ve earned and a report of what it converts to in money.

I gave a brief summary about my experment with Adgitize, but I never really explained what Adgitize was!

Adgitize is really similar to Entrecard. It’s an advertising platform for bloggers. You earn points by doing a variety of things relating to your blog and those points are then converted to cash. The more points you earn, the more money you’ll receive. You can also use Adgitize to advertise your blog on hundreds of other blogs for just $14 for a one month ad. I think this is an extremely cheap price considering how much your ad will be shown.

Like I said, there are a variety of ways to earn points with Adgitize. You can earn 100 points for each day you publish a new post on your blog. You can only do this a max once per day but if you do it everyday, it’ll really add up.

You can also earn points for page views and ad views on your blog. The difference is that the ad views count can be higher if you have more than one Adgitize ad on your blog. So let’s say I’ve received 40 page views today, but my ad views count is 80 because I have two Adgitize ads. The max amount of ads you can show is 10. If you have the max 10 ads on your blog, you’d be earning points for every page view, but x10 for ad views. That’s a lot of points!

Another way to earn points is by clicking on the ads of other blogs. If you see an Adgitize widget on someone’s blog – you’ll earn points for clicking on it (If you’re logged in and a member of course). If you click on all of the available ads, you’ll receive 100 points for that day. The amount of available ads for today was only 84, so getting 100 points for this is easy – and it works similar to dropping an Entrecard on someone’s blog.

Since I’m testing out Adgitize and reporting my findings to you guys, I’ll be talking about it a lot. I hope you don’t mind, as it could result in money for you too if you listen.

Yesterday afternoon I put up an Adgitize widget on EntreBlast. I’ve seen the widget on a lot of Entrecard blogs and you can see mine in the sidebar. I’ve added my RSS url to the sidebar and after a full month I’ll evaluate the program and see if it’s really worth it or not. I’m going to be earning points just by posting on my blog and with page views. So, it’s going to be a casual experience but definitely will help see if the program is worth it.

Do you use Adgitize? Let me know your thoughts, or any tips you’d like to share. For those who are thinking about maybe trying out Adgitize, I’ll be updating how much money I’ve earned from the program as soon as I can that information, probably after a week or two. So stick around and subscribe to EntreBlast.

In yesterday’s post, I pointed out the many issues users were experiencing Wednesday and yesterday. At 7 pm I edited the post and said that the issues were fixed.

Though the problems are fixed, you might still notice the amount of Entrecard credits you have is still lower than what it was a few days ago. This is because any transactions made yesterday were not saved. So basically, all of the drops you’ve made and received yesterday don’t count.

These problems were not addressed by a Entrecard admin on the Entrecard blog or via an e-mail announcement. But, after 11 pages of discussion by confused and angry Entrecard members, Phirate finally discussed what had happened:

The internal system that manages drops and credits suffered an unexpected and serious disconnection from the database that manages our long-term storage.

As a result, it was unable to commit operations like drops to the back-end, despite being able to keep track of such things internally.

This disconnection has never happened before, and in theory at least shouldn’t actually have been possible – the system should have reconnected itself as soon as it could. It was necessary to restart the affected process and thus only drops that were recorded by the database could be recovered to generate current balances.

I apologize, it’s not possible to recover drops made during the time when the disconnect was in effect.

It’s disappointing that it took so long for these problems to be addressed by someone who knows what’s going on, as there were a lot of concerned members. Good thing is, everything is now working! The ads that were supposed to be running yesterday but didn’t change are running now, so if you were supposed to have an ad running, it’s up now.

Since yesterday, users have been experiencing a multitude of technical problems with Entrecard. These problems include:

• Number of cards dropped on you showing ‘0′
• Drops Inbox not updating with cards you’ve dropped on
• The number of card drops on the Statistics page does not match the number of card drops at the top of the screen
• Ads running on widgets aren’t changing
• Statistic charts are empty for incoming and outgoing drops today are not showing

So if you’re experiencing problems, just try to hang tight. You’re still being credited for your drops. Hopefully these problems will be fixed soon.

Update: It’s 7 pm EST and it looks like the problems have been fixed.