You have too many affiliate links and Nobody will ever click any of them

B2B, Blogroll, random September 18th, 2008

Well the title says it all. I’ve been to many many sites that take upwards of 15 seconds to load, and not to my surprise, half of the content is affiliate links. Now, I have nothing against putting ads on your blog. You deserve to make a few bucks for being a helpful contributor to this wonderful thing we have called the worldwide web. I’ll tell you what though: I’m not going to read your fricking site if it takes a year and a half to load!

I’ve decided to take a different approach to my advertising model, and I suggest that others do the same. I have decided to hand pick what I’m promoting, and only promote services that I have used before and personally like. I’ve also chosen to forget about the flash style ads (such as widgetbucks) in the interest of having a faster loading page. I’ve also ditched the full-page browser hijacking ads that everyone despises so much. It’s just not worth the half-a-cent-per-visitor revenue that I earn.

That being said, here are the two products I’ve chosen to promote for now, and a bit about each of them. Note: One offers a free trial, and the other actually MAKES you money, so they are worth checking out.

The first is PayPerPost, where you basically get paid to blog. There are hundreds of topics for you to choose from, and they generally pay anywhere from 5 to 20 dollars per post, with what I believe is a limit of 3 posts per day. This is great for someone who has a blog about random topics, a “how to make money” blog, or a personal blog. I used this for a quite a while, and made some nice extra cash from it. Payout is pretty fast, too, only takes 30 days if my memory serves me right.

The second is great for anybody who has clients. I do mean ANYBODY with clients. There are tons of anti-spam laws, and HIPAA regulations and so on that are hard to keep up with regarding mass e-mails. This takes care of everything for you, and lets you keep in contact with your clients for whatever purpose. If you’re announcing a new product, or a new sale, sending out a mass e-mail to anyone who has chosen to receive updates from you is a great way to get the word out. It lets you target the people who you already KNOW are interested in your company. Beats the heck out of sending 5000 postcards and hoping someone reads it! Constant Contact, an Email List Management Tool lets you try it out for 60 days to see if it does everything you hope, and they don’t require a credit card or anything like that… they aren’t going to bill you if you forget to cancel.

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Entrecard reciprocal dropping speed tips

Blogroll, networking, random September 9th, 2008

I lot of dedicated Entrecard users find a driving obligation to return the favor when someone drops a card on them. For the last few days, I have been dropping like a madman, and found quite a few ways to speed up the process without “cheating” or missing out on a chance to find a new interesting article to read. Here are my steps.

1) Use the Firefox browser. This is crucial, as the next two tips require the Firefox browser. Also, it loads tabs much quicker than its major competitor.

2) Find another browser that you are comfortable with. Right now, I’m typing this post in the new Google Chrome browser, but use Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari… whatever you feel comfortable with. You’ll be loading several pages at a time in Firefox, and this tends to slow it down a LOT if you are trying to use other tabs for your day to day browsing.

3) Install the Entrecard toolbar. This gives you quick and easy access to your favorites, and your inbox for dropping.

4) Install the imgLikeOpera plugin for Firefox. This is a key speed boost. A good 90% of the time spent loading a webpage are on images, and this plugin allows you to set images to not load by default, and change the settings back and forth very easily with just a few clicks. Once this is installed, you’ll want to configure it to allow images from Entrecard to show up, or else you won’t be able to drop.

Click Tools->Add-ons. Click the “options” button for imgLikeOpera, and then go to the “filters” tab. Type “entrecard.com” in the filter box, change the drop down to “[1] load all images”, and click add. This ensures that no matter what settings you choose, the Entrecard widget will still load. Going back to the main tab, “Cache, misc”, you’ll see the drop down for “default policy for new window/tab”. This is where you’ll switch back and forth from speed browsing, and normal browsing. “Don’t load images” for fast browsing, “Load all images” for normal day to day browsing.

5) Know your keyboard shortcuts. In Firefox, hitting CTRL-Tab will switch you to the next open tab, and CTRL-W will close the current page. ALT-Tab will switch you back and forth between Windows programs, and the space bar is just like hitting page down in most web browsers. CTRL-D will add a bookmark of the current page you are on for later reading. Holding CTRL while clicking a link will open that link in a new window in most tab-enabled browsers.

6) Drop away! Using the Entrecard toolbar, you can open 10 windows at a time in the category of your choosing. I usually load up 10 pages, then click the button again once it lets me, and let 20 pages load up in the background. I switch over to my Google browser and check my ad stats, or write a new blog entry, and check back about 60 seconds later. (Slow internet connections or older computers may have to wait a bit longer). I have one hand on the left side of the keyboard for CTRL-TAB and the space bar, and one hand on the mouse, I can usually drop all 20 in about 20 seconds or so. After I drop them all, I then tab through all the windows one more time, making sure the drops did in fact go through, and checking for new articles I haven’t read. I quickly CTRL-D those that I have an interest in reading, Hit CTRL-W a handful of times, and do it all again. Overall, it takes about 5 minutes of my time to drop 20 cards or so, and I’m productive in between as well.

If you think I don’t read posts because of this speedy process… think again. It was an article that fellow Entrecarder Laura over at Confessions of a Diet Coke Addict wrote that inspired me to share this post while doing my dropping routine. I hope this helps save her some time, as well as the rest of you fellow Carders. Happy Dropping!

(I dropped 117 cards while writing this article)

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