It’s been 8 days since my last InvestorBlogger Dot Com news update… Lots to fill you in…

In recent posts

With summer vacations coming up, many people are now getting out their credit cards for summer holiday spending so this video offers some Good Advice for ALL Credit Card Applicants and the post suggests Three Effective Rules for Credit Card Security. Izea is still causing controversy with Social Spark and PayPerPost properties. In this post from a brief exchange between Gordon of Customer Love and yours truly, we look at whether Izea is still a good Idea or not. Then I go on to ponder if it is time to give up posting for pennies. While being a blogger, I have used both Notebooks vs. desktops, but I’m now looking at the Asus Eee 900 PC – which is available VERY soon!

Alexa updated their rankings and data

In Alexa News, they’ve finally updated their own rankings system with new input feeds. It has caused many blogs to suffer declines in readership as the previous data was overly dependent on very limited data sets: I’m glad that Alexa is finally trying to present more objective data. But I still think there’s a long way to go, and that Alexa is just playing catch up now. Compete, Social Spark and a whole raft of sites now offer some kind of external traffic ratings, too. Alexa risks becoming not just largely useless, but also ignored.

Of course, InvestorBlogger suffered a drop. Do I look worried? No. Because my Google traffic is still showing upward signs. And traffic levels are double a year ago on average. It’s Alexa that’s been the problem, not my traffic. Alexa is struggling to stay relevant in a fast moving web 2.0 world… can it succeed?

I still don’t know what “reach” means or why the page views is so off sometimes… Oh, well. The good news is that I’m still showing some decent rankings, if only for yesterday! I’m hoping I can push the figure back to 100K…

THE Entrecard Widget

Entrecard recently introduced a new pricing scheme for their advertisements for members. I’ve been a member for a few months now, and I’ve been learning how their system works. It’s already producing additional traffic for me. Not a great deal but enough to make it worth while. But a lot of people are unhappy with the change to the selling system… it certainly produced a huge hiccup in the advertising. I thought the system was going to fall apart. Well, it hasn’t. If you’re an Entrecard user, drop a card on my widget on the right, then scroll down and see if your link shows up on the “You drop, I link” widget on the bottom left!

Oh, if you use the widget, beware the dofollow link in the text code.

<a href=http://www.work-at-home-wealth.com/widgets/myecinbox/?c=********* title=”Work-at-home-wealth.com, Free work at home resources, free affiliate resources, free affiliate marketing articles, reviews of top affiliate programs, free widgets for your blog or website” target=”_blank”>Free Widgets at Work-at-Home-Wealth.com – Get yours</a>

This is how the widget looks. Pretty neat, really!

One of my ads produced a small flurry of activity on my site, and that’s when my site was unavailable for 12 hours! I’m sure I’d have gotten more if I’d been available longer. Thanks, John.

Does PayU2Blog suck or not?

That’s the question I’m asking myself after being unceremoniously kicked out of their program without any communication or email (of course, that’s what I’m concluding but for the lack of any confirmation…). Oh, and I did email them.

It could be because… I recently tried out the Blog Sponsorship function on SocialSpark on two of my blogs (one of which was being used for PayU2Blog, as well). When the sponsorship function came out, PU2B simply came out against the entire Social Spark Sponsorship thing, claiming it was because the blogs belonged TO the bloggers, not SocialSpark. I’ve selected a program for this blog, but I haven’t finished evaluating its impact on the blog. Check this review of SocialSpark.

Actually, that action was disingenuous because it’s obvious that all they cared about was protecting THEIR patch, not their bloggers’ rights. They immediately saw it as a threat to their own business model, and warned all bloggers in their system about using it. Well, stupid me, I didn’t see that post until I had a banner approved for showing on my blog. I forgot about it when the banner didn’t show up immediately. Then boom! No login. Do they have a TOS anywhere? No. A FAQ that states this policy change. Not that I can find.

Overall, I liked the program as you were not very restricted on what you said or how you said it, despite not having much choice about the site links. But the fact that in-post disclosure wasn’t permitted bothered me. Disclosure rules in the UK are certainly tightening up soon, and I expect disclosure to be MANDATORY at some point, if only to protect bloggers from being sued for misrepresentation.

So that’s it in InvestorBlogger World.