My Internet Marketing Adventures

I suck at Internet Marketing, which statement is the equivalent of a death knell for this blog. I shouldn't be too surprised, as I suck at Sales & Marketing in general. I'm one of those people who would donate items to a thrift store instead of holding a garage sale. I always hated to "ask for the check" when I was a loan officer, which is a sales position of sorts. I've never been any good at Network Marketing, despite having been involved in several different companies, thanks to my mother, who is a good Salesperson, even if she isn't a particularly good Marketer.

I got to a point when I was a loan officer (7+ years) when I realized that it didn't make a difference if I did the loan or someone else did the loan. The programs were all pretty much the same and there wouldn't be a disturbance in the Force if I were to stop selling loans. People would still have plenty of good loan options to choose from and my employer would likely fill my position with someone who enjoyed the competitive sales arena more than I did.

I understand Marketing just fine. What I lack is a bit of that "there's a sucker born every minute" mentality that drives much of sales and marketing. Yes, I can feel the indignation of the few sales types who have bothered to read this deeply (three paragraphs) into this post, but honestly, why do you think sales is the art of persuasion? You're persuading someone to do something they wouldn't likely do otherwise, and most of the time the key ingredient in the mix is lack of good market information. Marketing campaigns focus on highlighting strengths and diminishing weaknesses, which in a perfect market would aid the process of matching goods and services with buyers' specific needs, but in an imperfect (ie - normal) market instead is the manipulation of buyers' needs to match the strengths of what is being offered for sale.

What does all of this have to do with Internet Marketing? From what I have seen over the past almost 6 months is that there are bunches of ways to earn money online and only a few folks actually succeeding at it. Traffic to one's site, just like traffic to one's brick and mortar store, is an important element of success at Internet Marketing. Then, once they are at one's site (or store) the task remains to persuade them to purchase something from you and not from one of your many competitors. And I'm not very good at that.

I did enjoy signing up for the various affiliate ad programs and it was fun to choose ads to go on my various sites, even though none of them ever resulted in an earned commission. I'm not big into Google AdSense, and the $1.91 in my account isn't likely to make it to the payout minimum for another 30 years or so. I did earn a few bucks from SiteHoppin BeerStocks, but I think Max made an accounting error when he sent me the $6 or maybe it was a rebate of my donation to his beer fund. Bidvertiser sent me $25 for doing something, but I haven't figured out what and I actually did make about $20 from Project Wonderful in the course of a month. So, I guess as I think about it, that still sucks when considering how much time I put into my various blogs. The one dimly visible source of light and income in this sad, dark tale has been Entrecard.

From mid-January I have been harvesting Entrecard Credits (ECs) and hopefully when I finally sell off my inventory I will have cleared over $1000. That's still a pathetic return for the amount of time that I have put into my Entrecard efforts, but it's better than nothing. The problem is that credit farming or harvesting is not a favored Entrecard activity, although its negative status has developed over time and wasn't as clearly defined when I started my 20+ Entrecard accounts in January and February. I won't be continuing my EC harvesting activity and most of my accounts will be deleted in the near future. I've discovered that I don't really relish blogging and I'm not sufficiently motivated to do the things that build readership. I feel I've contributed to the Entrecard community more than I've taken from it and my remaining involvement will be motivated not by profit but by a desire to do what I can to help Graham Langdon succeed in his Entrecard venture.

As such, I expect that this will be one of the last entries in this blog, although should I stumble upon (such a fun phrase to use) some winning strategy I'll be sure to mention it here.

I think I see daylight. It's been several months now and I've been so focused on Entrecard that I almost forgot why I joined the community in the first place...to help make money online! And while I did make some money, I spent more time involved with Entrecard than I ever intended to. I'm not entirely done with Entrecard, but I'm wrapping things up and hope to be back to solid ground by May 1st. I've just reapplied with PayPerPost for this blog and am waiting approval. I'm excited to get back to making money online and I learned a lot from my time in Entrecard, but I'm moving on.

I've got dozens of profiles scattered around the internet on various sites like Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Orkut, and more. Many of them allow for posting links or graphics to blogs and websites and I spent some time recently updating some of these profiles to reflect my current activities. I've stopped promoting Ready Health Products and Goyin, primarily due to my 75 year old mother throwing in the towel and saying "enough." For the time being I'm listing The Entrecarder as my main blog, but I'm not sure how long that will last. I've enjoyed my 20+ Entrecard accounts and have been able to make some money from harvesting Entrecard Credits (ECs), but it's become somewhat of a chore to drop cards and so I'm pulling back to focusing on two blogs, this one and The Entrecarder.

I also spent some time cleaning up my presence in MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog, as well as creating an Entrecard "community" on Ning and publishing an Entrecarder lens on Squidoo. Rosemary Smekal introduced to NowLive.com and I established a profile there and recorded my first podcast, which can be accessed via the widget in the sidebar of this blog. I've still got plenty of updating to do on various sites and only time will tell whether or not I stick with this approach to publicizing my blogs.

Counting all my blogs I have created more than 100 original entries since the first of the year, some which took a minute of two and others which took over an hour to write. Just as when I was a radio talk show host, I can honestly say that I haven't been bitten by the "bug", that thing that drives one to keep at it and continue to want more. I'm starting to think that I'll look into developing some of my websites, a more difficult task than mere blogging in that I have to bone up on on html. The idea of having more static content is becoming more appealing at this point.

Overall I expect that I'll pull back from my internet marketing adventures and seek to spend more of my time in more traditional (and reliable) income production. I've been having fun...but more money means more fun and I need to focus on money more than I have been so far this year.

It's both a strength and a weakness, my propensity to do things my own way. I'm one of those folks who can analyze quickly and change path accordingly, which sometimes is good and sometimes isn't so good. Admittedly, I have been far too distracted by the Entrecard community and have been having loads of fun building a money machine for harvesting and selling ECs. That's good, I guess. The downside is that I'm not really building any long-term value with my Entreniche blogs.

I see lots of advice about making money online in the emails I get from blog subscriptions and the blogs I visit while dropping cards. I read it, comprehend it, and then proceed to ignore it. I don't read John Chow or Problogger and I'm not a student of blogging or making money blogging. I tend to follow my own muse and am more than happy to not do the same things that everyone else is trying to do. From past experiences I have learned I enjoy idea creation more than idea implementation and that's not likely to change.

Even the way I write my blogs goes counter to the experts' advice. Honestly, I'm bored to tears by most of the blogs I see, what with their carefully formatted regurgitation of somebody else's ideas. They might end up making more money with that approach than I do with mine, but it's not a road I care to travel. Truth be known, I still write primarily for myself and the few folks who care to follow my musings.

Over time I expect I'll find some additional ways to make money online and they likely won't be the ways that the crowd has chosen. And if that means that I spend most of my time off wandering on strange unmarked paths, hatchet in hand, then so be it. After all, it was adventure I was seeking, not fame or fortune.

One of the prizes that I won as part of Bloggin-ads.com's "One Heck of a Giveaway" Contest in January was 200 pages from OneBuckWiki.com. OBW uses a similar model to Graham Langdon's Million Dollar Wiki, only the pages currently sell for $1 instead of MDW's $100 per page price tag. How do these pay per page wikis work? From MDW's FAQ page we read:

Every page is dedicated to a unique word or phrase. The content on each page is controlled by the page’s owner. Owners use the site, and specifically their page, as a vehicle to generate traffic, revenue or publicity.

And from the same FAQ re Why Buy A Page?:

There are many of benefits in purchasing a page. As a page owner you:

* Secure an exclusive niche in a growing micro-economy.
* Raise awareness of your website, product, or service.
* Own a keyword or phrase that perfectly represents and brands your business.
* Cultivate a heightened web presence.
* Share traffic generated by the entire community.
* Join a resourceful community of motivated entrepreneurs.
* Receive storage space on our server for your page's content.
* Link quality content to your relevant website for better SEO.

There are also many ways to directly earn a profit from owning a page.

* Sell products or services off your page.
* Sell ad spots or use Google AdSense.
* Resell your wiki page (developed or not) at a later date.

So I was pretty happy when Max, from Zedomax.com sent me a congratulatory email and I started on the task of picking keywords that I wanted. It took hours to come up with about 190 keywords and keyword phrases! Some of my chosen words related to sites that I have started or will start in the near future and other keywords I lifted from the MDW's most popular list.

Even if One Buck Wiki never reaches critical mass and my 200 keywords languish and fail to develop any real value, the exercise of choosing them was a valuable one. I've been so focused on the Entrecard / blogger aspect of my internet marketing adventures that I needed to pull back and remember that blogging is just a small part of a larger picture.

I've been busy reorganizing blogs and structuring my internet marketing adventures. Entrecard is still my main activity and I've now expanded to a full 20 active Entrecard accounts. 11 of them fall under the Biz Beacon umbrella and are designed with the Entrecard community as the main audience. I'm using The Entrecarder as my main blog for recording what I've been up to with Entrecard and won't duplicate too much here on this blog.

I've mentioned before that one of my goals is to drive traffic to Ready Health Products' website and to that end I've restructured how I'm working with Project Wonderful. I had a skyscraper of 6 125x125 boxes on the Entrecarder site and it ended up being a lot of work to manage it. I had followed the advice of others and set the minimum cost at "free" and only had a few days when the bids got up over $.03, with maybe 27 cents being the best day. At the same time I was bidding on a number of sites and got some decent traffic through to the Ready Health Products site. Pretty cost effective for a small budget, seeing as how I spent about $2 (net) over the course of a week. Still, I wasn't really ready to run an indepth campaign and so I took the skyscraper away and emptied out my funds and let my PW account sit idle for a few days.

Honestly, I was getting bogged down with all the card dropping and maintenance of the Entrecard sites and wasn't overly enthused with this whole approach. I was a bit flattered when "coincidentally" someone started using my idea for guessing locations that were presented using Google Earth. In fact, I started rejecting ads and stopped dropping cards, sold off my Entrecredit stash, and was ready to take a break from everything Entrecard-related. (As has been common for me, I get my best ideas in the early morning and have had to learn to not make decisions when I'm tired at night.) It was just a day or two later that I realized that I had an asset--multiple established Entrecard accounts--and I just needed to reframe how I was approaching things.

That's how the Biz Beacon Advertising Co-op came to be. I had another 7-10 ideas for blogs that were in various stages of development (most of them brand new) and I quickly set about the process of registering them, finding or creating a graphic for the Entrecard, and getting them all tied together in a group of 20 blogs. The idea was to provide a service that might be needed on Entrecard...the ability to do a scheduled ad blast across 20 blogs. Full details can be found on the Coop site. No one has taken me up on the offer yet, but that's ok...I can put my own ads on the Co-op sites at no expense.

It's funny how random things can happen as if they were orchestrated. Just as Entrecard was experiencing some VERY slow response times, we caught wind of Spottt, the new link trading concept from AdBrite. I'm sure that I'm not the only one who took advantage of the break from Entrecard to check out this new service. I signed up for a couple of accounts for my different blogs and was amazed at the number of impressions that I got in the first few days. What does that mean for my traffic? Nothing. I'm not tracking traffic and haven't made it a focus yet. Naturally, the guys at Entrecard see Spottt as a competitor, but I don't see it that way. Why not have both on your site(s)? That's what I decided to do, in addition to an ad that someone can purchase by the week via the Co-op and the Project Wonderful ad, which defaults to an ad for Ready Health Products when no one has ponied up for the minimum bid amount.

AdToll also made a splash recently by unveiling their Peel Away ads, which caused me to try one out on the What Do YOU See? site. I find it interesting that some of the purists in the blogger community would prefer that a blog have no ads on it whatsoever. I don't like a page full of obnoxious ads anymore than the next guy, but even PBS has learned that a little income from ads can go a long way towards paying the bills. I intend to keep trying ad programs in order to see what works best for me. But before I go too far down that road I know that I have to continue to create content, refine the look of my blogs, and get listed with directories, etc. And in the back of my mind is that nagging little voice whispering "SEO...SEO is the way to go." I'll get there one day. The huge broad market is full of opportunity and my ultimate goal is to press beyond the blogger community and present sites that will add value to the masses of search engine driven consumers.

I'm not the nurturing type who fusses over plants. My typical approach to growing things is to get them started and move on. Oh, I'll water and weed the garden often enough. (It's under a foot of snow at the moment.) But I think the plants know that I'm not really committed to their success. As I look at my internet marketing activities, I am hoping that they know that I DO care about their success. I care because I see them as little money trees, albeit just barely sprouting at the moment.

Part of the reason that I'm choosing to look at my blogs this way is that I have 20+ active blogs in my orchard and will likely continue to plant more. That's 20+ money trees that I am hoping will mature and bear fruit for at least several seasons. It helps to envision these sproutling blogs as future money trees so that I don't expect too much of them in the short run. I need to feed them and care for them if they are to mature and develop.

I know that what I am doing is somewhat unconventional...and that's ok with me. I find it both challenging and satisfying to have so many different blogs and am energized by the opportunities I encounter each day. I am confident that my little money trees will bear fruit if I am diligent in caring for them. And I am grateful for the advice and knowledge that I am gleaning from my fellow gardeners.

I've been busy with my internet marketing adventures (MIMA)...but almost all of it has been Entrecard related. I established my EntreCarder blog with the plan to cover the details of my Entrecard activities there instead of here on this blog. So, turning back to MIMA, I am slowly working toward improving the Ready Health Products website.


Ready Health is owned by some of my family members and one of the reasons I am trying to build traffic on a number of blogs is to provide multiple spots for Ready Health ads. No middlemen to pay and that means a good profit margin on each sale. I'm not a coding expert and so blogging was an easy way to start marketing, even though it's taken a lot of time to lay the foundation via Entrecard. Of course, I wouldn't mind making money from other ads on my various blogs, although I figure I'm still a few months and dozens of posts away from that point. One day at a time.

I've made some changes to this blog and my approach to Entrecard and will take a moment to explain what I'm doing and why. I wish I could say that I had this strategy in mind from the beginning, but the truth is that things have just evolved to this point and likely will continue to do so in the future. As this blog is intended to be a record of My Internet Marketing Adventures, I've noticed that it was turning into mostly a record of my Entrecard activiites. Valuable, but that's not all that I am doing or want to do with my online marketing. The first offshoot was a blog about Affiliate Ads & Referral Programs, which is where I can write about ad companies and place ads and referral links that I don't want on this blog. The next related blog was about Blogger Communities, and then one about Reviewing For Money, Entering Blogger Contests, and the most recent one I've called The Entrecarder. Each of these blogs has a specific purpose and I hope that each will be of value to the reader. I'm just getting started with these blogs and will be scrambling to add quality content as quickly as possible.

At first I was going to give each of my blogs a different look so as to create a separate identity for them. As the number of related blogs grew I decided to use the same template for each and to cross link them via tabs. I'm hoping that the end result is a coordinated presentation of my Biz Beacon brand, with easy transitions to each site. Each blog has its own Entrecard, so feel free to jump via the tabs or links and get 6 drops for 1 basic visit. However, because they are separate sites the Archive and Search functions only cover the specific site you are on at the time.

Over time I might migrate (or copy) the Entrecard content on this site to The Entrecarder, as it really is my intent to push beyond the Entrecard world and start actually making some money on the Internet!

I guess I was an Entrecard member for almost two weeks before I caught on that the ad values and stats were updated at midnight Eastern Time. Armed with that knowledge, and the recognition that there are Entrecard members from many parts of the globe, I got to thinking about how the relative time of day impacts how and when one drops cards. I'm guessing that the majority of Entrecard members try and drop cards back on those people who dropped on them. And I have found that I get more cards dropped on me after a chaindropping spree, as many folks who aren't chaindroppers are returning the favor. Building up one's ad price might be good for the ego, but there is also no denying the value of being one of the top 3 in each category, as it means you are getting additional exposure on the Campaign page. (Ad value is calculated as twice the number of cards dropped on your site each day, using a rolling average over the most recent 5 days, including the current "day", which begins at 12am ET.)

Dropping a card on someone when they are most likely to be logged into their account might improve the return card drop rate. The same logic is used as the reason to not drop cards on blogs that haven't been updated in a while...the goal is to generate a return drop and hopefully a good visit to your blog in a timely manner, as in that day. When possible, I start card dropping right after I've posted a new entry here so that the regulars are presented with a new headline, or at least see today's date on the post. When I am chaindropping or using a hybrid method that I'll call multi-avenue-drop-surfing* (MADS), I take the time to read a post that interests me and make a comment here and there.

Choosing when one drops a card on someone living in Japan versus someone living in England might mean the difference of a day before they return drop a card. I live in Utah and the Entrecard magic moment occurs at 10pm, a good time for me to drop some cards as I am winding down for the day. That's part of what got me to thinking about time zones. If I drop cards on people who live on the East Coast there is a good possibility that they aren't at their computers and won't see that card for another 4-8 hours, at which time I might have moved too far down their list for them to even know I dropped a card on them. That's not good. On the other hand, dropping a card on someone in Australia who is in full blogging mode might get me a quick return drop.

This kind of analysis might seem a bit extreme to some of you and I suppose it is. I'm not sure it matters right now when you drop your cards as the Entrecard community is still in its infancy. However, when there are 10 times as many Entrecarders are there are now, the strategy of dropping cards by time zone might make more sense.

*MADS worked well for me today as I was able to combine chaindropping from bookmark folders with free form card surfing. I started by opening up a folder with 10 or so booksmarks in it and dropping cards tab by tab and clicking on each Entrecard to open up yet another tab. Not as efficient as pure chaindropping, but I ended up visiting sites that I don't usually see when chaindropping. And because each of these had purchased the right to be on that specific Entrecard, it was a good guess that they were on the more active end of the spectrum than might be found by just trolling through the Campaign pages.

I cringed a few years back when the phrase "web surfing" got picked up by Madison Avenue advertisers, as it seemed so passe to me at the time. I "surfed" the Internet in the mid 90s, before Yahoo made a couple of young guys into millionaires and there really wasn't an easy way to find new sites. You just followed links to wherever they would take you, sometimes good, sometimes not so good.

In real life, I like to surf--having learned in Hawaii while living in Honolulu and going to school at UH--and like to bodysurf even more. The fact that I'm 667 miles from my favorite beach does cut down on my opportunities to splash in the waves and occasionally get pounded into the sand. And until this morning I hadn't thought about "web surfing" for a while, either.

Admittedly, I have been chain dropping Entrecards and looking to be efficient in building up my advertising cost for this blog. Yippee!! As of the moment it cost 140 credits to put your Entrecard on this blog and no one is lining up to do so. I've just about cracked the top 10 in the Internet Marketing category at Entrecard and I'm feeling satisfied with my progress...but not so much to keep chain dropping much longer. Life has to move on and as soon as that memory card arrives in the mail today I'm shifting the chain dropping to my 10 year old...cuz I'm going surfing!

I guess I actually did what the Entrecard creators intended I do by using the Entrecard as a link to the next site. In 30 minutes I dropped 50 cards, signed up for a couple of feeds, entered a contest, and READ about 15 posts. Sometimes the "wave" died out and I had to "paddle" back to the dashboard, or more often I would go through BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog to get to the next Entrecard, signing up as a friend or contact with new folks I passed along the way. No, not as efficient from a pure card dropping point of view, but much more satisfying and useful for long-term blog success.

I do. I really do. I DO have a strategy about my blogging efforts and Entrecard in specific. Yesterday I started up my I've Entered The Contest! blog and established my 6th(?) Entrecard account. I started the contest blog because I didn't want to clutter up this blog, which is sort of an account of my internet marketing activities. Shilling for contests, especially those which want you to write a blog post to participate, doesn't fit with what I want to do with this blog.

I started by entering the Tylercruz.com vs winningtheweb.com contest and then I entered one of Emma Nelson's contests at ItsWriteNow.com. I could have just stopped right there, but I realized my contest entries could also serve as a compilation of contests that other bloggers / Entrecarders might want to join. So, it's turning into a bit more work than I anticipated, but it should have some value to the community, in addition to possibly winning me some prizes.

Using similar logic, I had already started Tips for Newer $ Bloggers, a blog that lists some of the more common affiliate ads & referral programs. And I'm just getting started on Top Blog Communities, a blog that covers MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, OthersOnline, Bumpzee, and, of course, Entrecard, among others. Again, this blog is geared toward those bloggers who are just starting up with the monetizing process. The next in the series will be Reviews for Money & Other Remuneration, a blog where I can explore the pay-per-review process. I have a couple more ideas for blogs about blogging niches that I might foray into under the BizBeacon umbrella, and another blog where I write about product ideas I have come up with over the years, like Bankshots, Ancestors Mobile, Beach in a Box, and more.

And that's not all!!! If you order now... Actually, I have another bunch of blogs that I am working on that fall into the Intunique or Provorem categories, but most of those won't be making an appearance for another couple of weeks.

As time goes on I suspect that my blog will start to look more and more like the outside of my refrigerator, cluttered with all sorts of stuff that might not get noticed after they become part of the landscape. It occurred to me that someone should (if they haven't already) create a button or widget (which, of course, would further slow down the page) that allows the visitor to indicate that they felt the page took too long to load. Just like those "How is my driving?" bumper stickers.

I got to thinking about it this morning while I was riding my exercycle and clicking through Entrecard sites, merrily dropping and sweating, killing two birds with one stone. While we have cable broadband, the computer that sits next to the exercycle is running Windows 98 and isn't the speediest one in the house. And while page loading speed seems to have always been an issue for me (I hated that AOL spinning ball back in '93 at 2400 baud), I really notice it on a slow computer that stalls easily if I ask it to do too much...like load more than one page at a time.

I recognize that bloggers have different goals in mind and different audiences they are targeting. Most of the traffic to this blog comes via Entrecard and that is where I am focusing my energies at the moment. I don't really expect that most card droppers will read more than my headline and I'm OK with that. I don't trim my posts down or purposely make them RSS-friendly and I know that my posts are not usually a quick read. I'm happy when chaindroppers cruise on through and I want to be included on their lists. Which (finally) brings me back to my topic. When I am pedaling away, I have found that I'm willing to wait about 5 seconds for a page to display their Entrecard before I'm pushing "Stop" and then "Delete" from my bookmark list if the Entrecard didn't load. Sounds cold I suppose, but with so many Entrecard sites to choose from, why do I want to wait for a slowpoke? Sometimes pushing Stop works really good--too good on some sites--when the Entrecard loads and nothing else.

All of which got me thinking about how quickly my blog loads. No, I don't really expect people to take the time to comment...but IF I had a button they could click that would give me some idea of their dissatisfaction, I might be able to trim the fat from my page and speed things up. I suspect that most widgets don't individually kill page loading speed all that much. But in combination with large graphics, YouTube imbeds, and oodles of other widgets, things can get downright pedestrian for readers with slower connections or computers. How much does anyone want to see the "Waiting for..." message?

As long as I'm at it, I made a few other notes while riding:
1) When I'm in full chaindropping mode I look first to the upper right hand column under the header for the Entrecard. That's usually because I opened a bunch of bookmarks at the same time and I'm trying to be efficient. However, I noticed when I am opening them one by one from the list I have opened on the left side of the browser window, a left hand column Entrecard placement is preferable.
2) Some of my bookmarks require a pass-through an Entrecard url. Oops. I guess I should have just bookmarked the site and not dragged the url from their Entrecard profile page.
3) There's some conversation going on in the Entrecard forums about chaindropping and the ranking system that Entrecard uses. Honestly, I'm feeling sheepish about the company I find myself in on the Entrecard board. I'm still new at this and have maybe 1 regular reader (thanks Mom!) I see the cost of "advertising" on this blog as an indication of the time I am devoting to Entrecard and not the intrinsic value of my blog or its content. The slight competitive urges that I feel to climb the rankings help me stay focused on this blog (and my other blogs that have Entrecard accounts). And so when I look at the folks I am meeting through Entrecard (like Emma at ItsWriteNow.com, or TurnipofPower.com) I feel somewhat like an interloper and recognize I have plenty of dues to pay.

It's only normal that some people will get their Entrecard set up and lose interest after a day, a week, or a month. It goes to what their expectations were and how closely reality came to meeting them. So, as I was dropping cards last night from Turnip's list, I swept about 30 stale Entrecards into the trash. I'm sure that they were fresh and hopeful when they first made it to Turnip's bookmark list, but I figure that if they don't have a January 2008 post yet, they ain't taking their blog too seriously. And that means that they aren't likely dropping any cards. And so why do I want to drop a card on them? I don't.

I also discarded (great word, under the circumstances) another 5-10 sites whose content was static or dateless. Again, they aren't likely doing much card dropping. And of course, anyone whose Entrecard is below the fold is headed to the trash, too. Fortunately, there are so many Entrecard members now that it's not too hard to find plenty of folks to visit who just might drop a card back on your blog. New members are great because they are still fired up about Entrecard and are happy to get cards dropped on their sites.

I guess it's going to be a constant cycle of out with the old and in with the new. One real positive I experienced was that as I was scanning posts for a date (as in calendar), I managed to read more content than I have been in my recent dropping sprees. And that was a good thing!

Adbrite is getting hammered today in the Entrecard forums. Apparently they have been bad boys and are now on the Entrecard blacklist. It only makes sense that Entrecard should derive revenue from all of the activity that goes on and as I got to thinking about it I realized that I hope they (honestly, I really don't know who "they" are and should probably spend a few moments to find out) make a boatload of money from Entrecard. As they get more and more successful they will be spending more and more effort getting the word out as they decide to build their reputation outside of the blogging world. And as that happens, more and more folks will be arriving at Entrecard and the community will continue to thrive.

I'm enjoying the sense of community that exists here on Entrecard, and the spillover that I'm experiencing in MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and other communities. I don't comment all that often and have only had a few conversations with other Entrecard members, but I'm starting to recognize familiar cards and feeling more comfortable with the regulars. I write with my own voice and I'm not yet attempting to optimize my posts for anything other than my own satisfaction. I don't have designs on being the best blogger by any measuring stick and my income goals for this blog are very modest. My larger desire is to be informative and entertaining, and to get efficient at this process, seeing as it is just a small part of what I do.

Perspective aside, and my 51 years not withstanding, it's still very cool to see something work. Like someone putting money in my tip jar (otherwise known as My TopSpots) or saying thanks for pointing them towards a useful site. I suppose there will come a time when such small successes will become routine, which realization is why I'm savoring them today. Like fellow travelers met along the trail, there is a camaraderie that exists solely due to sharing the same place and time, no matter how fleeting the moment. Hello, G'day, Cheers, and Godspeed to you all.

My recent adventures have taken me to NameDrive.com to sign up and earn some money from a few unused domain names that I have. NameDrive puts ads on the sites and splits revenue with you. NameDrive also has a referral program...so if you're interested you can follow the above link and give me credit or you can circumvent my involvement and risk karmic disaster by cutting me out of the loop. ;-)

I heard about a new deal called Qassia on becslife.biz (and signed up with her referral link), another benefit of participating in the Entrecard community. Here's what the folks at Qassia have to say about themselves:

"Qassia is fantastic because you get credit for sharing your intelligence. The more credit you earn, the better your websites will rank. And you get a backlink to your website for every intel you add - only Qassia gives you unlimited quality backlinks.

Last but not least, Qassia also has the best ad revenue sharing system on the Internet, so in effect you get paid for promoting your websites. Qassia rocks!

The more people join Qassia, the more everyone will benefit, so give Qassia a spin. Signing up takes less than a minute, so you've got nothing to lose. See ya around!"

I even dusted off an old post about "Is rock music evil?" and added to their "intel."

Whilst on becslife.biz I noticed she had a "tip jar" in the form of a Scratchback "Are You In My Top Spots?" widget and decided to toss a buck in and sign up for my own tip jar. Feel free to do the same! (No referral program yet.)

I had applied to join NeverBlue's ad program last week and spoke yesterday with my account rep, Craig, who asked me about my business, etc. Yippee! I got approved. Of course, I had to smile when he wanted to verify my mailing address for the Accounts Payable department. I did get my first email from NeverBlue today and there were a couple of pretty interesting affiliate ad programs that I could sign up for. Several people (sorry, I can't remember who) had mentioned in their blogs that they were very pleased with NeverBlue and so I'm hoping it will work out well.

As far as Entrecard goes, I'm just grinding away. I have found that card dropping goes well with my riding my exercycle in the morning and I'm just plugging along. Props to Turnip for being an Entrecard expert so I don't have to be. He's also very generous to provide his list of Entrecard booksmarks for free, which will save the new Entrecarder many hours of work. I could post the link, but you would be doing yourself a disservice to not read his posts about Entrecard, so head on over to his site to get the list and some great advice.

Last note for today's entry is that I changed my profile photo to my Bearded pic. Why? I like the look of my beard in a photo more than I like the feel of it on my face. This way I get to enjoy seeing my bearded self showing up in the BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog widgets without having an itchy face.

Here's what I'm doing with Entrecard as of the moment:

1) Multiple Entrecard Accounts - I have more than one Entrecard account due to having several different online businesses that I am promoting. This account, "My Internet Marketing Adventures" is my main account and is a record of my activities on Entrecard and elsewhere that I combine under the BizBeacon brand. A second account, "Intunique...the art of smart," (the model is my youngest daughter) is designed to build readership of my blog that deals with Multiple Intelligence Theory, personality, and how each of us has specific intellectual abilities that are in the gifted range, even if we don't realize it. My third account is "Madame Goyin", a collection of MLM tips and experiences that I have ghostwritten on behalf of my mother, who has been the CEO of 3 separate MLM companies. (That's her in the 60s when she was a top fashion model, standing there next to the Goyin bottle.) My fourth account is "Tips for Newer $ Bloggers" and is designed to introduce folks to the more common Ad companies like AdToll, Bidvertiser, Widget Bucks, etc.

2) Review, Sort, & Bookmark Entrecard Sites - Thanks to Turnip I started bookmarking sites so I could quickly open them and blast through them in mass card-dropping sprees. I haven't hit his pace yet, but it does quicken things up significantly. My current method is to check the Most Recent sites and drop a card from my "Tips for Newer $ Bloggers" account. Then I either put their bookmark in a folder for Above The Fold (ATF) or Below The Fold (BTF), and occasionally--based on adult content or really slow page loading--I don't bookmark it at all. I have found that my computer works best when I keep the bookmarks in a single folder to 20 or less. I use the right click "Open All" feature in a new window, click the first card and then click the tab of the next card, continuing until all cards have been clicked, leaving the tabs open for the time being. Then I close the Firefox window (which quickly closes all the tabs) and move to the next folder. Am I reading most of these blogs? No...unless the title to the top post catches my eye. However, I have found that it takes my computer a minute or so to load all 20 sites and so I am in the process of placing a blog that I want to read every day as the top bookmark in the folder...if it loads quickly. That will allow me to read it and click through the rest. Initially I thought I would go through both the ATF and BTF groups of folders, but honestly I don't want to spend the extra time to scroll down. To me that says that the blog owner doesn't care enough about Entrecard to make it easy for me and I'm not particularly motivated to help grow their traffic as a result.

3) Purchase Ad Space From The Bottom Up -At first it seemed like a good idea to use my Entrecard credits to place my card on the category leaders' sites. However, that thrill passed quickly and I'm now purchasing ads starting from the bottom of the category and working my way up until I'm zeroed out. I've been shifting credits from my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th accounts to my main Entrecard account to improve my buying power. My goal is to get as many ads running as I can so that my fellow Entrecarders get used to seeing my card and consider me one of the regulars.

4) Recruit Assistants - As I build this system it will become easier for someone else to grind through the 200-300 cards each day. It was fun for a couple of days, but I'm quickly getting to a point where one of my 5 children who are still living at home could do it just as efficiently.

I think Entrecard is a great idea and while it might appear that I am trying to game it, the truth is that everything I do benefits someone else's site, in addition to mine. I still have plenty of work to do to optimize my blogs and I haven't yet gotten into the comments, backlinks, contests, or other good ideas that are proliferating around the Entrecard community. Feel free to point me at your site if you have some good ideas for leveraging my Entrecard experience.

As one might surmise from the title of this blog, not all of my Internet Marketing Adventures are about blogging. I've been involved in network marketing as a distributor on a number of occasions and on the Corporate side as a strategic planner and CFO. I'm naturally a bit leery of many MLMs as they don't favor conservative, play-by-the-rules type of owners...at least the ones I was hired by. Yet, there is no denying the power of networking and earning some money by recruiting others to join in the fun. We see it now in the Affiliate Referral Programs that are popping up to compete with AdSense for blog ad space.

I joined Direct Matches for free and quickly upgraded to a paid position due to the vibrancy and activity on the site. Most everyone who shows up at Direct Matches has been in network marketing for years and did not get the results they had hoped for. Direct Matches provides a venue for folks to promote their MLM or money making deal of the day and connect with like-minded entrepreneurs. There is no obligation to upgrade to the paid program where income is earned based on others' activities, but with the monthly cost set at $29.99 it's not too painful to give it a try.

My timing wasn't great in that I signed up in mid-December and then got distracted by the holidays, only to be further distracted by my blogging activities. So this morning I made the decision to call up and cancel my paid membership, having not really given it my best effort, but somewhat concerned about money going out every month that I wasn't doing much to leverage.

Turns out that when you call to cancel you end up talking to Bill Weber, the president of Direct Matches himself. I guess I wasn't really ready to quit and after spending 30 minutes talking to Bill I was ready to give it another try. He shared some insights about how others are experiencing success with Direct Matches, but what struck me the most was that he was willing to spend the time talking with me when such a small amount of money was at stake. He wasn't hustling me or trying to pull a fast one, just explaining how he has been able to earn 7 figures in network marketing for many years. But he could have been talking about the weather...because what I really heard was the sincerity in his voice. That's what got me to stay.

I liked what Bill had to say about the people he likes to work with: 1) They have a good attitude; 2) They have a high belief outlook; and 3) They have a good work ethic. He said that he gets 20-30 calls a day from people wanting to cancel their memberships and with most he just takes their information and lets them go. The others (like me) he senses something about that causes him to deliver a little pep talk.

Networking and talking to people on the phone or in person about signing up for your deal isn't for everyone, and I suspect that many bloggers prefer writing over striking up a conversation with a stranger. However, for those of you who are looking for a dynamic, free, social network where you can promote your business to lots of people, please check out Direct Matches. And if you talk to Bill, tell him that Kent sent you.

This past week has been quite an education and much of it came from the collective expertise found in the Entrecard community. While I have blogged off and on over the past couple of years, I'm awed by the sheer volume of good blogs that I've run across. One truism that I've encountered in my real world adventures in the business world is that you only get to be a "newbie" for a short while and those impressions are extremely valuable because the largest part of the general populace are always going to be newbies.

I have a couple of different areas of interest that don't really fit together into a single blog and I started off with the idea that I would have multiple blogs so that I could write to niche audiences. I've since segmented the potential audience into 6 different categories:

1) Intunique - A word that I borrowed from ancient programmers (people my age and older) and applied to the concept of "unique intelligence", hence Intunique.

2) BizBeacon - My branded word for my online business activities. This blog falls into the BizBeacon category, as do my other online marketing activities.

3) Provorem - A contrived word resulting from the two cities that represent the core of Utah County--Provo & Orem--where I reside and work. The content for these blogs--which number over 25 at the moment--eventually will meld together into a website that deals with our local business community.

4) Ready Health Products - This company is owned by a relative and I'll spend some time blogging on several sites to drive traffic to the main website.

5) Anonymous Blogging - I've got some ideas for blogs that I think will be entertaining (think PG-13) but that I'm not sure I want to have fully integrated with the rest of my blogs.

6) The Rest - Blogs on Driving, Volleyball, Genealogy, Positive Thinking and more. My creative outlet.

I'm still in the process of determining how I want to reach each audience and how best to monetize my sites. My first inclination was to include as many ads, communities, feeds, directories, etc., that I could on a site. OK, so it looked pretty busy and unattractive, and there was only so much that I could fit above the fold. Honestly, while it's a good thing that there are so many ways to earn money with your blog, it can be challenging to figure out which path to take. So, as I was already committed to multiple blogs based on audience, I decided to expand the concept a bit and design different blogs--with the same content--for different marketing approaches.

For example, I reworked my Intunique blog that is hosted by Blogger so that it was "optimized for Entrecard." Many thanks to Turnip for his Top 5 Entrecard Tips and Tricks, as I realized that my page had likely been too full of ads to be of interest. Basically I wiped most everything off the site except for the Entrecard and my own ads. And then I bumbled my way through setting up a BuzzBoost through Feedburner so that the content from my main Intunique blog gets posted on the Intunique blog that I have optimized for Entrecard.

I have since repeated the process for another Intunique feed site that is focused on Communities: MyBlogCatalog, BlogCatalog, OthersOnline & SpicyPage as of the moment. My thought was that I can continue to build that site so it's visitor friendly, a site that will encourage lingering and poking around, something that the streamlined Entrecard site isn't designed to do. My plan is to have at least two--and maybe more--Intunique feed sites that address different marketing approaches tailored to specific types of advertising like Adsense, Amazon, CJ, Adtoll, and the many others out there.

I'm pretty excited about the prospects of this market segmentation approach to monetizing my blogging and have to smile about the fact that all of the structuring work I am doing is getting in the way of writing!

You might expect that I could give the following 6 reasons for being a monetized blogger:

1) To Make Money
2) To Make Money
3) To Make Money
4) To Make Money
5) To Make Money
6) To Make Money

Actually, while the money IS a consideration, it isn't the only reason that I'm wandering down this road. There are plenty of ways to make money in life and plenty of roads to travel, and so as I am creating my plan for blogging and other online marketing activities, I am trying to keep things in perspective and make sure that I accomplish other goals than just making money. Here's numbers 2-6 on my list:

#2 - To Promote My Interests.
I have an itch to propagate Multiple Intelligence Theory and my own ideas about brain wiring and our unique intellectual abilities. Notice that I said "itch" and not "burning desire." Intelligence, personality and temperament intrigue me, but don't absolutely inspire me to make Intunique my life's work. Yet, when there is a possibility of earning a few dollars while I research and formulate my ideas about intelligence, it helps to get me moving forward.

#3 - To Leverage My Regular Business Activites
I have worked with small businesses in my local area for a number of years and continue to be active with the local Chamber of Commerce. Occasionally these small business owners need some marketing advice or are willing to pay for some of my experience and talents, like the fact that I've been a radio talk show host and am comfortable conducting live interviews. Blogging about business in our local area helps me add greater value to my clients.

#4 - To Stay Reasonably Proficient with the Internet
There is no way that I can hope to be an expert, but the process of setting up blogs and learning about social networking, etc., at least gives me the hope of not becoming a complete dinosaur. The Entrecard community has been a good source of info about blogging for dollars and I've been a Mashable reader for several months now. Even though I took a Fortran and Cobol class in college, I highly doubt that I will ever be much of a programmer, but it's nice to be able to tweak things here and there.

#5 - To Exercise My Creativity
It's tremendously cool to register a domain name (or an account on a site like Blogger) and be off and publishing within minutes or hours. Several of the blogs I am developing are extensions of ideas that I've had over the last 20 years, ideas that have heretofore languished in a folder in my file cabinet. I'm not particularly artistic, but I've managed to come up with a few relatively novel ideas for sites that will be graphic intensive. Again, I doubt that I would be pursuing these if I weren't aided by the possibility of a earning a few bucks along the way.

#6 - To Participate In the Larger Community
My family keeps me busy and I'm not one to spend much time socializing. As I have been working from home for most of the past 3 years, I find that days can go by where I don't talk to anyone who doesn't share DNA or a surname with me. And while I'm basically ok with that, I recognize that I have a desire and responsibility to support the larger community. Blogging gives me an opportunity to meet people from all over the world and never have to take off my slippers.

I guess the big question about my list of reasons is how likely am I to continue blogging if reason #1 doesn't materialize. Hmmm.

I'm very impressed with the Entrecard ("Entre" as in Entrepreneur) concept as a method for quickly getting traffic to one's blog! First of all, it's easy to set up,with perhaps the first real hurdle to overcome being the choice of a image to put on one's Entrecard. Not to worry...you can easily change the look of your Entrecard if you misfire with your first attempt(s).

Why does Entrecard work?

1) Entrecard (hopefully) moves link exchanging a couple of steps closer to Google acceptability and empowers the "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" vibe.

2) When you "drop your card" on another Entrecard you get Credits that can be used to buy ad space on other Entrecard members' blogs, thereby getting your blog some valuable exposure.

3) Entrecard Credits are rapidly becoming a form of currency that can be used to purchase goods and services in addition to ads.

4) The market forces involved with the price of ads for specific Entrecard members' blogs helps maintain the vibrancy of the Entrecard community and helps introduce beginning bloggers to the laws of supply and demand that exist in the broader internet marketing community.

5) As there are many blogs in the Entrecard community that focus on how to make money with blogs, visiting other members' site and dropping your card can be very educational.

6) It's entertaining to see the different Entrecard designs and it's fun to see one's Credits soar without too much effort. Now, if only each Credit was worth a dollar!

Feel free to comment about other benefits to Entrecard that I might have left off my list! Also, let me know if you think there is a point where your blog traffic is high enough that spending time to drop off your Entrecard is not an effective use of your time.

I spent too much time today messing with templates and trying to figure out how to make some minor modifications to Minima. I got off to a productive start by fleshing out my Orem Business Blogring and Provo Business Blogrings and the 10 sites that will be in each one, as well as another 4-5 blogs that pertain to the local area. My advertising plan is to include ads for Ready Health Products, World Vital Records, and Hammaka on each of the blogs, with Google Adsense being the only other ads. These blogs won't be up and running with content for a couple of weeks minimum. And it's important to know that the reason for having so many sites is that there are tie-ins with some real world business activities that I am involved with, like the Chamber of Commerce. Otherwise I couldn't justify the time expenditure just to have another 25 blogs.


Orem Business Blogring

New Orem Businesses

Orem Non-Profit Organizations

Top Rated Orem Businesses

Homegrown Orem Businesses

Orem Business VIPs

HOBnobbing in Orem

Open or Closed in Orem

Big Big Biz in Orem

Orem Professionals

Provo Orem Chamber News

Provo Business Blogring

Top Rated Provo Businesses

Homegrown Provo Businesses

New Provo Businesses

Provo Non-Profit Organizations

Provo Business VIPs

Big Big Biz in Provo

HOBnobbing in Provo

Open or Closed in Provo

Provo Professionals

Provo Orem Chamber News

Other Local Blogs

Get Rid Of It Now

Utah County Auctions & Ads

Where In Provo Am I?

Where in Orem Am I?

Top Local News

Utah County Job Finders

I've been grinding the past week getting my main blog, Intunique, up and running. It's been an interesting learning curve to say the least! I've tried a couple of times to get a blog about intelligence and personality started in the past, but after reading a couple other blogs about blogging, I made the decision to host my own blog on my own domain. I still have my blogger site that will have similar info but with a different look and different widgets.

Installing wordpress wasn't all that bad and I only had to ask my programmer son for help on a couple of sticky spots. But it's not like I want to go and repeat the process tomorrow! Instead I am planning on starting blogs here on blogger and if things go well, like I actually write in them more than once a month and I'm getting some traffic, I'll consider moving them to my own domains. It's just so easy to get started on blogger and this morning I created about 40 blogs, bringing my total here on blogger to over 50.

Why? It's not that I like to write all that much and most of these blogs will be in the neighborhood of 2-3 entries a week on average. But as long as I'm going up the learning curve on blogging, advertising, linking, communities, directories, feeds, etc., I might as well leverage that knowledge as best I can. The economies of scale that result from having multiple blogs makes sense if I can keep up on everything...which only time will tell. Also, the ability to create my own rings, will allow me to drive traffic back and forth between related blogs that I'm writing.

How many is too many? I'd like to have 100 blogs!

Today's big adventure was to create a spreadsheet with all the blogs, advertisers, communities, directories, feeds, etc., so that I can keep track of what I'm doing. That, and starting to write in them!