Cribbed Content for October 31st
Friday
Oct 31, 2008
Happy Halloween!
This will be a short & sweet version since I know I have stuff to do to get ready for my Halloween Shenanigans this evening, and I’m sure you do too!
- Jamie Birch wrote a great article for affiliates on his blog titled Why Aren’t They Accepting My Application? I did nod, and I think this is a must read for any affiliate, whether they’re just starting out or have been around for a few years.
- I attended a Marketing Sherpa teleseminar on Email in a Downturn: Looking Ahead to 2009. It was pretty insightful and I recommend checking out the slides for any email marketer.
- Julie Vazquez has been named Blogmistress of Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas. She will be the liaison between the Summit staff and those of us hanging in the bloggers room. Press pass people only, please.
- BlogRush is shutting down. I’m so not surprised, as you’ll remember my break-up with them. Viva la Entrecard!
Cribbed Content for October 10th
Saturday
Oct 11, 2008
Okay, it’s not the 10th. I severely slacked yesterday due to a stomach ache that wouldn’t die. Nevertheless there are some things I really want to share with you, so I’m adopting the “late but worth the wait” mentality to this post. I hope to get back into the swing of things soon – I’m still adjusting to working from home and finally have my docking station set up so perhaps I can be a touch more productive working on a real keyboard and my lovely 30″ monitor.
I digress… the links! This week’s links are mostly about blogging.
- Chris Brogan, a fountain of useful information, posted an interesting one the other day about 25 Ways to Build Your Community. Excellent tips that I admit I’m not using nearly enough, but are super simple to implement.
- This actually came from last Friday, but Darren Rowse wrote another great post for you fellow bloggers out there on How to Choose Categories for Your Blog.
- If you’re an Entrecard user like myself, and subscribe to the U Drop, I Follow movement, there’s a new WordPress plugin for you to make it easier.
- Darren also wrote another great post this week on 8 Tips for Affiliate Marketers on Using Twitter. If you MUST utilize twitter for marketing efforts, this is the way to go about it for sure.
Free Toolsday 9/2 – Entrecard Toolbar
Tuesday
Sep 2, 2008
I’ve already talked long ago of how awesome I think Entrecard is. Any free traffic source is great, let alone a free advertising medium as well. A couple weeks ago, they got even more awesome in my eyes with the launch of their Entrecard Toolbar.
Similar to what SiteHoppin’ was offering, Entrecard has taken it upon themselves to offer a tool to allow EC users to jump from blog to blog within different categories to see what else is out there – and efficiently drop your EC card to receive credits. I really enjoy being able to use the “Next Ten Sites” button within the toolbar to have 10 tabs open up in Firefox and be able to wander through them as I desire.
Yes, it’s great for effectively dropping ECs, but I’ve always said that I actually LIKE going around to different blogs and checking out their content, site design, what ads they’re running, etc. So this serves that purpose as well.
This is a screen shot of my toolbar right now – I just went and spent all my saved EC’s on ads so I’m starting from scratch. It doesn’t take up a lot of room at all, and offers you different choices of category to browse within and different ways to order the results: Most popular, Newest, Cheapest, Most expensive, Most advertised, and Random. The final benefit – and best – is that while you’re surfing these blogs the toolbar updates to tell you how many ECs an ad on that site costs, if you already have an advert in the queue for that site, and allows you to purchase adverts by clicking on the button that shows the price. You can also add the blog to your favorites site by clicking on the heart.
The only downside to the toolbar is that it’s a toolbar. Sounds weird, I know, but what I mean is that I have two other toolbars and I can’t toggle this one on or off like the StumbleUpon toolbar to save screen space. This isn’t a problem for me, but currently the toolbar only runs on Firefox 3 as an add-on, so anyone still using Internet Explorer to switching over to Google’s new browser Chrome will have to do things the old fashion way! This is the first release of the toolbar with a second beta release out now, so hopefully in future releases they’ll address the browser compatibility issue.
