Do not date him!
Posted on September 15th, 2008 by Richard Catto 7,249 views
Cape Town news brings you the latest South African blogging absurdity – Do Not Date Him! – powered by the Drupal content management system.
This pettiness, which is sure to be abused by vindictive heart broken South African women, is brought to you by Andries of Pangea Publishing and hosted by, wait for it, eFrog.org. Hahaha!!!
*ribbit*
2009-09-26 UPDATE: the donotdatehim.co.za site is no longer in existence
Tags: do not date him, efrog
Filed under blogs, South Africa | 39 Comments »
It started off with 11 reasons why Paris Hilton is smarter than you
Posted on August 15th, 2008 by Richard Catto 1,460 views
and quickly veered off course to a discussion about stalking, Jamie Lee Curtis, Hayden Panettiere, Demi Moore, baby poop, Mike Myers, Austin Powers, Shatner, Halloween, homicidal maniacs, Big Fucking Guns, Doom, Big Stupid Blogs, hallucinations, therapists, classic schizophrenic behavior and auditory hallucinations.
Who knows what is next in the mad bad definitely weird discussion that seemingly has no end?
Read it all for yourself, here.
Tags: auditory hallucinations, Austin Powers, baby poop, Big Fucking Guns, Big Stupid Blogs, classic schizophrenic behavior, Demi Moore, Doom, Halloween, hallucinations, Hayden Panettiere, homicidal maniacs, Jamie Lee Curtis, Mike Myers, Paris Hilton, Shatner, SiteInsights.com, therapists
Filed under blogs | 5 Comments »
The Ten Rules of EntreCard dropping
Posted on August 12th, 2008 by Richard Catto 1,583 views
The whole idea of EntreCard is NOT to amass EntreCard credits. If you manage to amass 1 000 000 EC, you will still not be a millionaire. You will still be broke in real life.
The REAL idea behind the EntreCard community is to PROMOTE your blog. You want to increase your traffic and enlarge your community of regular readers. You do not want to become an EC millionaire. Spend your credits, because it’s just funny money. Dump it regularly on advertising, EVEN IF that advertising is not particularly effective. Keep spending it in different places until you find where it works best.
Before EntreCard came along, there were others. Many others. The first blogging community (or social network) that I joined was MyBlogLog. Then blogcatalog. Then BlogRush. StumbleUpon. Digg. Reddit. FaceBook.
BlogRush came along just before EntreCard and it promised huge amounts of additional traffic. For each time your BlogRush widget displayed, your latest blog post would be displayed somewhere on someone else’s BlogRush widget along with 4 other headlines.
BlogRush failed miserably, because nobody clicked on the stories syndicated throughout the BlogRush network.
Where BlogRush failed EntreCard saw a way to succeed.
Instead of promoting a single blog post, EC promotes the entire blog via a graphic advert, instead of a text RSS feed headline.
EC’s original idea was that it would drive traffic via adverts placed on third party blogs.
However that idea has not succeeded very well. Most adverts placed on the EC blog network result in a very dismal amount of traffic. Many of the adverts that I place result in ZERO clicks. I suspect this is because of the small size of the EC adverts. EC widget ads measure only 125 x 125 pixels. Many bloggers like this format because it does not clutter up their blog. However, REAL banner adverts that actually get clicked are MASSIVE and right at the top, like the 900 x 160 pixels top banner advert that I display throughout the AAA network, including this blog.
But EC does generate lots of traffic! It’s just not generated where its inventors expected it to be generated. EC’s traffic comes from YOUR DROPS on other people’s blogs.
An EC ethic arose out of nowhere that if you drop on someone, generally they will drop back on you. Some prefer to state this explicitly by belonging to an EC clique such as “U DROP I FOLLOW”, but generally more and more EC members are adopting this drop style even if they don’t announce it. I follow this method. I return drops directly out of my drops inbox. I don’t always manage to drop on everyone who dropped on me, but I try to pick up people I missed later.
This being the case, the only way possible to get the MOST out of EC is to drop the maximum EVERYDAY. If you drop less than 300 entrecards a day, you are going to receive sub optimal results.
Here are my suggestions for the most effective EntreCard dropping strategy:
The Ten Rules of EntreCard dropping
1. Never drop on those who don’t drop on you
If you drop on someone, and they never or seldom return your drop, you are wasting a precious drop on them. Rather find someone else who will always or frequently return your drop.
2. Always drop the maximum of 300 a day
If you drop less, you are guaranteed to receive less traffic than what you could have.
3. Drop as early as you can.
The EC drop count is reset to zero every day at midnight EDT (GMT-4) / EST (GMT-5). As soon as it is reset, start your fresh drops, because then others have the whole day to drop back on you, whereas if you start later, they may have finished dropping by the time you drop on them. Drop on them FIRST, if you can, and then your drop will be seen and returned.
4. Drop first on your 10 top droppers
Your top droppers are your most loyal droppers. Show them the same courtesy back or you might lose them to others who appreciate their loyalty. Find ways to reward those who drop on you regularly.
5. Drop on more than 300 blogs
If you go through your inbox regularly, you will soon notice that you receive drops from more than 300 other bloggers. Since you can only drop on 300 blogs a day, it is impossible to recipro drop on everyone every day. You may even have more than 600 different bloggers who drop on you regularly. The way to handle this is to create lists of 300 blogs each and take turns cycling through them.
6. Do not become set in your ways
If you only ever return drops on the same 300 blogs every single day, guess how many EC readers you will have? If you’re lucky, about 300. What if you want a lot more than 300 readers? What if you want 3000 or 30 000 or 300 000 or even 3 000 000 EC readers? How do you use the EntreCard network to expand your reach?
By dropping on new people every day.
With the introduction of the new EntreBar, EntreCard has made it easier to seek out the far corners of their network and reach new bloggers. Reserve about 50 drops a day for those uncharted waters. Always be thinking of getting new blood into your blog. Keep things fresh, keep things vibrant.
7. Combine dropping with advertising on EC blogs
As I mentioned above, advertising on EC blogs generally does not result in as many visits as dropping does, however, it still does bring some extra traffic on average and since it makes absolutely no sense to hoard EC credits, you might as well spend them each week on new blogs to increase your fame.
If you drop the maximum amount each day, you will get in excess of 400 EC a day, roughly 3000 EC a week. Spend it each week on adverts. Blow your EC! Go on, blow it! You’ll get more again tomorrow, I promise you.
Actually, that’s all I can come up with now. The 10 rules of EntreCard dropping only has seven rules so far. But maybe you can supply the other 3? Come on, dazzle me with your insights. Tell me what else I am missing.
Tags: EntreBar, EntreCard
Filed under blogs, Entre Card | 15 Comments »
Rewarding my Top 10 EntreCard droppers
Posted on August 12th, 2008 by Richard Catto 1,442 views
I’d like to thank and reward my Top 10 EntreCard droppers this week, by listing them here and linking to their web sites.
Plus, as a bonus, I have decided that from now on, I will purchase advertising with everyone appearing in my Top 10 droppers list on Monday each week, no matter how much it costs me.
Tonight I spent 3200 EC on all 10 top droppers, who are:
Septagon Studios Inc News Blog (31)
7daybuzz (23)
Hello Mother, Hello Father (22)
What about Brazil? (21)
Word Scrawl (19)
Proud2parent (18)
Zental Floss (14)
Authority Directory (13)
The Truth of Credit (12)
The Future is Entertaining (11)
The number in brackets is the number of times they dropped on me during the past month.
Thank you all of you and I hope you will continue to be loyal readers of this blog.
Tags: EntreCard, Top 10 droppers
Filed under blogs, Entre Card | 2 Comments »
How to achieve an EntreCard rush
Posted on August 7th, 2008 by Richard Catto 2,385 views
I think a lot of bloggers are aware of the “rush” effect of certain blogger’s social communities on their blog traffic and are usually very keen to learn how to exploit techniques to maximise their traffic.
Why do bloggers crave traffic?
Because traffic translates into ad dollars. The more traffic a web site gets, the more attractive it is to advertisers.
There are a multitude of articles written about how to exploit Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Mixx etc. and many who claim to be able conjure traffic at will from these sources, but frankly they all suffer from an inconsistent ability to DELIVER.
At certain times, they fare much better than at others. But eventually, they all suffer from diminishing marginal returns. Part of the reason for this diminishing effect is that there exists a kind of “arms race” between the bloggers and the social network. The social network actively seeks to discourage attempts to exploit it. They prefer to have traffic generated via organic means, i.e. naturally, as a result of posting a great article that everyone is interested in reading, rather than deliver a constant flow of traffic to blogs which do not rise above mediocrity.
While this is a noble goal for them to pursue, it still leaves the ordinary blogger scratching his head and wondering what to do to get the traffic he needs to make the ad dollars he seeks.
I believe the EntreCard community fills that needed gap. With EC, it is not merely a case of submitting your blog posts to it and then sitting back and waiting for the traffic to arrive, which is the case with many other social networks, such as StumbleUpon.
Even when lots of traffic is generated by, for instance, StumbleUpon, the bounce rate is usually ridiculously high with few of the readers contributing to one’s blog by way of leaving a comment.
Bloggers want traffic, but they also seek to expand their regular readership base and to get their readers to participate in the discussions. This builds their own personal community and adds interest to their blog.
So how does one gain an EntreCard rush?
By dropping the maximum number each day – i.e. 300 drops.
This used to be quite difficult to achieve, but with the recent introduction of the EntreBar, which is a toolbar add-on for Firefox 3 web browser, this task has been made a whole lot easier.
But it’s not just a matter of dropping on 300 random EC blogs, how you drop is also important.
For instance, if you dropped on a random set of 300 EC blogs, I have observed that you can expect that only a third of them will drop back. So for your 300 drops, you’d get roughly 100 drops back.
But you can do better than that.
Over time, by examing your drops inbox you can identify those EC bloggers who fairly consistently drop back on you if you drop on them. Favourite them. Unfavourite all those who rarely return your drops. Over time, your list of favourites will contain only those EC bloggers who consistently reciprocal drop on you.
Then use your EntreBar to browse your favourites and drop on them FIRST.
If you have, for example, 100 favourite EC blogs, that leaves you with 200 drops left over to do. Divide that in half and drop your next 100 on blogs that have something in common either with your blog’s overall theme or in common with recent articles you’ve written. By doing that you may find that some of those who return your drops will find something about your blog which resonates with what they are doing and feel interested enough to do more than just drop on your blog.
The last third of your drops can be done on a random selection of EC blogs. The EntreBar conveniently offers a random selection option to make this easy.
But whatever dropping strategy you adopt, you will find that you get the maximum amount of traffic from EntreCard if you drop the maximum number each day.
So it takes effort, and that is what distinguishes EntreCard from other social networks. In that respect, EC gives you more control over your traffic because there is something concrete you can DO everyday to make it happen. You have less control over the other networks and therefore your results are more random and more inconsistent.
If you have a favourite method for maximising your EntreCard traffic and reader involvement in your blog, I’d be interested to hear it. Please leave a comment sharing your experience.
Tags: ad dollars, blog traffic, EntreCard
Filed under blogs | 6 Comments »
