Blogging

Making Money: EntreCards Launches Ad Network

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I’ve been running a small EC promotion for the past few months, and I’ve had over 20 signups for my mailing list! Thanks, guys! Of course, I’m still running the promotion so there’s still time to make a little extra EC before you are able to sell them starting next week! Sign up now!

Oh, and the feed’s borked at Google for some reason. I don’t quite know why but the stats aren’t working properly at all. Perhaps it was to do with the new theme that I put up last month. The theme had some options for setting feed, and so I used that instead of the FeedBurner plugin. Turns out it may have been a bad decision! I have only 1/5 of the regular number of readers being reported. And Google hasn’t really fixed things since January. TechCrunch has written about this issue, too. What is going on?

However, this shouldn’t affect the competition at all. And even better news about EntreCard.

ec ad network

The EntreCard Advertising Network that was announced last week is finally here. Check the blog to read the announcement:

Our much anticipated Ad Network is now online and fully operational! As a blogger, from your dashboard, you can toggle your “advert settings” for control over what ads can even apply to advertise on your blog, and each paid ad that wants to advertise on your blog will show up in a new column on your dashboard labeled “paid ads” just under the normal blog ads. From here, you can reject any paid ad you like, freely and quickly. Revenue generated from these paid ads will go to fund our future operations, feature development, more servers, and all that good stuff, as well as a war chest to cash out all your credits with (or all the credits of those who wish to cash them out!). So please approve paid ads proudly knowing you’re supporting Entrecard and the only true virtual economy in the blogosphere!

And rates are good for advertising at the moment! I’m tempted to run ads just to test the results. Pricing will adjust as time goes forward to reflect market rates. Promotional rates are just for the initial period. But will CTR be worth it? Would it be more cost effective than just buying credits and advertising on the regular network? At least with the regular network, you can get a day long ad! Could it be that the ad network’s greatest competitor will be their own EC system?

For bloggers, there will be the option to trade EC for cash by selling your EC back to EntreCard for cash. That system is still in the works at the moment! No wonder EC outlawed EC farms earlier this year! It would have ruined the whole economy. Of course, for your site, as blogger or advertiser, you still have to decide if the real estate you give to EC is worth the visits/traffic or time on site. My first experience wasn’t so positive for InvestorBlogger but this second effort may be better. Let’s see.

Blogging Tools: Wos Server – a useful tool in your armoury

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Ages ago, I wrote about how you could put your applications on a stick. For the inveterate blogger, tinkerer, and under-the-hood kind of guy/girl, you can also put a blog on a stick with WordPress, and (almost) everything you need. The only caveat: the blog is not (nor should be) live for security reasons.

investorblogger - in a box

Look closely at the browser bar. This is InvestorBlogger on my stick! I’ve managed to import all the posts, plugins and themes. Now I can carry my blog, and work anywhere my computer and cruzer can take me!

Wos server is an installable application that you can put on your stick or anywhere. It includes a full version of apache for serving pages, PHP for parsing code, and MYSQL for your database. You can download and configure your own version of the server yourself at the website. There are a wide variety of apps that you can install, of course, bloggers can choose WordPress! But here’s a selection of other packages you could try!

  1. DBHcms
  2. Drupal
  3. Joomla
  4. MediaWiki
  5. Moodle
  6. OpenDB
  7. Textpattern
  8. WordPress

You can visit their site, or download my own customized version with themes, and plugins to get you started. The WordPress user is admin and the password is password.

Additional steps to setting up your blog on a stick or desktop.

  • Step 0: Copy your files/themes/plugins to your desktop and anything else you want to use in your install in the wp-content folder at your site…
  • Step 1: Download the file and unzip it on your desktop.
  • Step 2: Open the folder and find the file mowes.exe. Hit that and open it. Wait a few seconds.
  • Step 3: Your browser window will open. Look for the entry ‘wordpress’ and click on that link. (or type http://127.0.0.0/wordpress/ or http://localhost/wordpress/)
  • Step 4: You will see a mini-version of a blog… with themes and plugins.
  • Step 5: Customize your blog by copying the files/themes/plugins you use from your site to the same location in the wosserver (ie. wos server/www/wordpress directory).

Login details are on the folder in step 2. This is not a real blog, just a mini-blog. You can play with it all you want. Break it, too. Your real blog will be safe and carry on regardless. Some plugins may not work because they require additional features, or are not necessary at all (spam plugins, for example). If you want to import your database, you could do that, too. But you will need a plugin that allows you to import your db into the wosserver: wp-phpadmin plugin might work.

Have fun blogging, but don’t worry about borking your blog!

Update: I’ve had a weird issue with this software. If you download and expand the files to your desktop area, and run from there. It seems to work. Otherwise it won’t run properly if you put the files elsewhere. Apache seems to be  hurdle but I’m not sure about this. This is a pity: if you are like me, and you use your stick on a number of machines, the server may not run properly. Another possible workaround would be to set the drive for your USB stick to the same drive on all your machines. That might work. I’ll let you know.  The obvious solution: download the entire original file from the kind people at Wos.

Broken Promises: A Blogger Confesses…

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Yes, it’s true. I have let my readers down on a number of occasions over the past few years. You see, I was thinking about all the things I started on this blog, but never quite finished, including several large projects on this blog… I never seemed to finish them at all.

  • 1. Introduction to Blogging.
  • 2. Quick introduction to WordPress (only got to lesson 7).
  • 3. Posting reviews for all the companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Averages.
  • 4. A daily posting schedule.
  • 5. Monthly Income Reports.
  • 6. More disclosure on personal finances.
  • 7. New blogs, subsequently closed and remerged.
  • 8. Can you spot any more?…

When you blog, there are so many things that can catch your eye if you are as unfocused as I was that it’s easy to be sidetracked. And I am. Easily sidetracked. Really.

I guess I will have to work harder and smarter on posting to my blog. I could blame my tools, the awkwardness of scheduling posts and whatnot, but truthfully, it’s all my fault. All mine.

So, if you like reading InvestorBlogger, I do hope you’ll overlook the incomplete nature of posting in this medium… Now if I could find a tool to help me upload, schedule and routinely manage posts by the bunch rather than one by one! Perhaps I could improve on that, but don’t hold your breath!

How do you manage your posting schedule? Do you schedule posts months in advance? Or do you fly be the seat of your pants?