EntreBlast

Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Buzz has been generating yesterday after Graham mentioned in the ‘Latest Buzz’ section of the Dashboard that Entrecard is going to be announcing its new partner on Tuesday. Well, today is the day. At 00:00 AM Eastern time, Graham announced Entrecard’s new partner.

The new Entrecard partner is:

Sezwho

Sezwho is a social networking site encouraging users to provide quality content and build a reputation for doing so. Your contributions (such as guest posting and commenting) get tracked and can be seen on your Sezwho profile. This builds credibility and reputation.

What does this mean for Entrecard now?

Sezwho will help add a community feel as well as rewarding users for commenting on other blogs. You’ll earn ECs for comments that you make on blogs. Quality comments is a must though! You won’t earn credits for lame comments. Users will rate your comments and from there you’ll receive between 1 and 10 ECs. Sweet huh?

Get Started with Sezwho

Getting started is super easy. You can register from your Entrecard Dashboard! Once there, under QuickStats, you should see a link asking you to sign up with Sezwho. Fill out the three fields and you are done! Once you have registered, you will have to download and activate the plugin to your blog.

For more information, Graham has posted a lengthy announcement on the Entrecard blog. Check out the official announcement of the partnership between Entrecard and Sezwho.

P.S – Sezwho is activated on EntreBlast!

With the recent post, “Promoting Your Blog With Digg“, Graham is looking to form an Entrecard community on Digg consisting of at least 200 members. Graham’s digg username is EntreLangdon, and we are well on our way to achieving the 200 member goal. Graham currently has 55 friends and I’m sure by the end of today he’ll have around 200.

Join Digg!

Digg is a great way to find interesting articles and even submit your own in hopes of getting “Dugg” and noticed. The goal here is get fellow Entrecarders using Digg and start Digging posts they enjoyed reading from blogs they’ve dropped on. Digg is free to join and use and can provide you with a new source of traffic.

The Entrecard Community on Digg

Having friends on Digg makes helping your peers and getting your posts dugg even easier. Once you have created a Digg.com account, make a comment on the post “Promoting Your Blog With Digg” or on this post with your Digg username. I’ll be compiling a list of Digg usernames here making it easier to add fellow Entrecarders!

The List
Below is a list of Digg usernames belonging to Entrecard users who have submitted it to this post or the Entrecard blog.
Read the rest of this entry »

Early yesterday, Graham brought up an idea in the Entrecard forums, deciding to organize a comment “bomb” or I guess it is also known as a comment “rush”. The idea is to select a quality post from a member’s blog, and spotlight it on the Entrecard blog. Users will be pointed to the user’s blog and post and then asked to comment on that post. The goal is to give 100 comments to that blog post.

There are many benefits to this comment rush, for both the receiver of the comment rush and those who comment on the receiver’s blog.

Benefits for the Commenter:
-Share your thoughts and critiques on a fellow members blog
-Free exposure, even if it is just a little bit
-Participate and give to the Entrecard Community

Benefits for the Receiver of a Comment Rush:
-Tons of free exposure
-100 quality comments with feedback on the post
-Chance to receive new regular readers and feed subscribers

Of course, if you’re selected for the comment rush, there are greater benefits. Imagine having free exposure to a site with thousands of active members! That should get your motivation up and running, right?

Personally, I think this new comment rush is a great idea. For one, it will help develop a community-like feel to Entrecard. Not that there isn’t a feel already. It’ll also motivate users to produce quality articles for their blog. If you could write an original, quality article for the chance to receive a spotlight on Entrecard, wouldn’t you? It’s a great way to reward those who put a lot of effort into writing something worth reading!

If you want to spotlight one of your posts, send Graham a message!

Entrecard’s First Comment Rush

The plan was to hold the first comment rush this coming Friday, but I guess excitement got the best of Graham and he decided to do it later yesterday, after the response in the forums was overwelmingly positive! So, was it a success, or a failure?

Success!

Before the day ended, the first ever comment rush was organized, produced, and then completed. Ken Armstrong was the first lucky victim of the Entrecard Comment Rush with his post, “Music and Driving“. As of right now, 10 AM Monday, Ken has received over 150 comments on that post. That is truly the work of a helping community! Ken received 150+ comments, tons of exposure, and probably a dozen links to his post and blog.

Now here’s the ultimate question: Will the users of Entrecard continue to comment on this new regular event? Or will momentum rub off and after a few weeks, it’ll take more than a day to get the 100 comments to a blog post? Only time will tell!

Effective July 1st, this coming Tuesday, Entrecard Quick Drop sites will be banned from Entrecard. These are simple-crafted pages and even entire sites made with nothing but Entrecard widget(s). Also known as Power Dropping, the idea is to easily locate the Entrecard widget(s), making it fast to just drop and leave the empty page. It’s just another way to cheat the system and now the Entrecard Team has decided to penalize those taking advantage.

I repeat: Starting July 1st, all Power/Quick Dropping Websites will be banned from Entrecard. Additionally, any of them that slip through the cracks and eventually caught, well the people that have been using them can be penalized as well.

Do not get confused. If your site is fast loading or your Entrecard widget is in a very prominent location, you won’t be banned. For example, those using the Entrecard Popper plug in on their blog is still acceptable.

Graham, owner of Entrecard.com, is doing a pretty good job trying to keep a community feel with Entrecard as well as being involved with the users that have made Entrecard successful. One way is by posting a link to his twitter profile. You can follow Graham Langdon on Twitter!

For those who are unfamiliar with Twitter, Twitter is a cool social networking site where you can follow your friends and see what they are doing, and update your friends on what you are up to! It’s a great way to get exposure for blog posts and sites, but it’s also useful in getting to know people you are aware of, like Graham for example.

You can follow me on Twitter too! The Entrecard community is invading Twitter!

Entrecard has just sent out an e-mail to all the ECers about new ways to earn Entrecard credits! Let’s take a look a what’s new:

Buy Entrecard Credits

Now, you can buy ECs directly from Entrecard! This long awaited feature is finally here, as users have been waiting months for this to come back! This will make it a lot easier to buy ECs than having to search for a user. Another plus is you know it’s a trustworthy source. So many users have been ripped off money from scammers, and now you can get it directly from Entrecard itself! The down side? It costs more than the typical selling prices of users. 1000 ECs is $9.50.

There is a maximum limit to the total amount of ECs sold more day as well, so for the first few days they’ll definitely sell out quick. Who knows, they could be sold out every day for weeks! The new feature hasn’t even been on for an hour and already it is selling out. I guess trustworthiness is more valuable than price for the ECers!

Update: Less than one hour of releasing the buy credits option, and they have already sold out for today!
Update #2: It looks like they’ve decided to put more credits up for sale because of the quick sell out!
Update #3: In less than 10 minutes of update 2, they have sold another 20,000 ECs. Crazy!
Update #4: Looks like they are stopping the madness and not adding more ECs, check back tomorrow!
Update #5: 40K ECs are available for purchase, 10 minutes later.

Earn ECs for Posting on Your Blog

This is a really interesting new feature, and I did not see it coming. Entrecard wants to encourage users to blog frequently by giving you ECs for posting! Earn 25 ECs for a new post, and you can earn this once every three days. This is a nice EC boost and you can earn it by doing what you should be doing regularly anyways- updating your blog! Hey, maybe their will be less blogs that don’t offer new content but continue dropping anyways. The flaw in this is that the new post is automatically fetched via the blog’s RSS feed, meaning the new post isn’t monitored. Spam blogs can just post gibberish/more spam and receive 25 ECs.

Earn ECs for Posting on Entrecard’s Blog

Do you read Entrecard’s Blog? It has slowed down lately, but it seems Graham is making an effort to start updating it a lot more frequently. He’s encouraging users to guest blog on the Entrecard Blog, and receive ECs in return! The more helpful and better quality your post is, the more ECs you’ll receive as compensation. You could get up to 2,000 ECs!

Here’s how to sign up to guest blog on Entrecard:

Step 1.) Get your post idea approved.

If you have an idea for a post, send Graham a message by emailing graham@entrecard.com. Tell him about your idea. If it sounds good, he’ll give you the ok. He’ll also set up your account on the Entrecard blog so you can log in and start writing it.

Step 2.) Submit your post for review

Once your post is complete, and the best you can make it, submit it for review but clicking the “Submit for Review” button. The post will be reviewed by Graham and Phirate, at which time we will decide how much EC to pay for it. If it is a stellar post that is going to help people be better bloggers, build the community, etc. we will pay up to 2000 credits for your post. If it is just a simple update, or announcement, we may only pay a few hundred.

Step 3.) We pay!

We will send you payment and publish your article. The better the article, the more we pay!

Earn ECs for Subscribing to the Entrecard Blog

There’s no point in working this hard to getting new content out if there is no one reading! That’s why Entrecard is offering 50 ECs for signing up to the blog’s RSS by e-mail. You can only earn this once, but might as well subscribe and get a quick 50 ECs!

So, Entrecard is finally back up today after being down for over a day caused by a what could have been disastrous electrical fire. Luckily, no databases were damaged so Entrecard is back up and running properly. Unfortunately, Entrecard will be going down again tonight. From 7PM EST time for approximately one hour, Phirate will be working on fixing the database to help speed up Dashboard loading times. It has been loading pretty slow. This update will fix those slow loading times!

9 hours ago, Graham sent an e-mail to all Entrecard users warning that Entrecard will be down from anywhere between 12-24 hours, maybe even more depending on how fast the datacenters can get back up and running. Apparently, there was an electrical fire taking down over 9,000 websites hosted by ThePlanet.

Hopefully, Entrecard will be back up and running soon! But, it hasn’t even been 12 hours, so expect it to be down most of today. Regarding the Weekly Entrecredit Blast – I need the drops statistics for last week in order to calculate how much the pot is worth so it is all dependent on when Entrecard will be back up. I hope we can get it up tonight!

Graham has announced the addition of a new category: Web Comics. (Warning- that post might make you tear up a bit.)

Now for those who have a web comic blog, you’ve got your own little cozy category! So far, there are only 4 blogs in the Web Comics category, but I’m sure more will find there way over there. Even though I haven’t come across many web comic blogs besides the 4 that are already listed in the category.

What’s a web comic? Well it’s exactly like the comics section of your Sunday newspaper! Except, it’s online and more are continually added on a blog.

Let’s see how many get added to the new category in the next coming days and weeks. I’d personally be surprised to see more than 20 web comics on Entrecard.

Graham has posted in the Entrecard Blog about an official Entrecard E-book in production right now! It’ll be jam packed with information and tips and tricks and will be available for download on the Entrecard site once released. Sounds cool huh? Obviously, it won’t do too much for experienced Entrecarders, but for the new guys, it’ll be a great resource for a ton of information compiled into one nifty E-book.

Graham is looking for some strategies and tips to add into the book, going “beyond the basics”. If you want to share your strategy, visit the forums and it just might be added!