Hanging In With Entrecard

I forget how long I have been using Entrecard, but I am still active with this traffic generating social networking site. I don’t drop cards every day and rarely do I come anywhere near the 300 card drop limit.

Funny, all those blurbs about dropping 300 cards in 5 to 15 minutes just doesn’t seem to work for me. It takes me at least 45 minutes, sometimes longer to get through 300.

Regular Visitors

What I do not do enough of is to acknowledge people who visit Matt’s Musings by way of Entrecard. I know a lot of you do and some of you are my top droppers.

January 2009 statistics are in and I would like to thank and recognize the Top 10 Entrecard droppers for the month. They are:

The Way I See It

Patsy’s Words of Wisdom

One World Realty

Cooking Japanese Style

Doocci.com

Cornymans Money-Blog, everything about financial independence

AsTheCrackerheadCrumbles

The One Minute Guide

WordJourney

Best travel pictures in the world

I have started to use Adgitize again and must say that I am disappointed in this service. Twice within the first ten days they were down, sometimes for two or three days at a time.  I understand that websites have problems but prolonged outages are annoying.

Using Adgitize

Entrecard, thankfully, seems to have moved past its growing pains so let’s hope that Adgitize will soon be able to do the same thing. In any case, these kinds of sites can be useful in helping bring in some extra traffic as well as comments to your blog. I have been leaving comments more often too so hopefully our combined efforts will benefit everyone.

I also appreciate my advertisers, many of whom are regulars too. That means I will need to keep track of who is advertising and thank them in a follow up Entrecard post.

Unrelated Business

Not related to Entrecard or Adgitize but still of importance are people who are leaving comments but are doing certain things that are definitely not kosher.

For example, when filling out the spot for your name please use only your real name. The name of your company or anything besides your real name should never be used. Granted, I will sometimes change your comment to reflect your real name (if known) or if your comment is still good, I’ll make up a name. All other comments I delete.

It is considerate when people fill out there comments correctly. You already get a nice link back to your site, but I don’t want to see links within comments unless they are related to the article. Still, use the line on the comment form to include that link.

I apologize for closing with this point, but I have seen a sharp uptick in the number of people who are spamming this blog.

Guest Bloggers Now Have An Ally

How many of you write guest articles for other blogs or websites? I must admit I have written only two guest posts in the past year. I’ve been so busy working on my own projects that I have not put much effort into soliciting other blogs to offer my contributions.

But that may soon change.

Thanks to a new site launched in November 2009—My Blog Guest—I may be doing some more guest writing. The more immediate plan, however, is that I will begin to allow people to  contribute to four of my blogs, opening up this site, Auto Trends, and a pair of customer owned blogs.

Ann Smarty started My Blog Guest, someone whose name should be familiar to people who run with the SEO crowd. I am not sure how long I’ve been following Ann, but I remember finding links to her articles on Sphinn–the internet marketing site–which launched in 2007.

Last week I found a wonderful guest article Ann wrote and contributed to Daily Writing Tips where she explained how people can find guest writing opportunities. Though that article was immensely helpful and encouraged me to tweak some of the information on my blogs to attract guest bloggers, the best part is that Ann founded My Blog Guest as a way to bring like-minded people together.

My Blog Guest serves to connect people who would like to write guest posts as well as help bloggers find these people. By joining the site you can search for bloggers by tag or category or go to the forum and find direct solicitations. One forum is dedicated to help you find guest bloggers, another one allows you to post your information, while there are three other sections set up for introducing yourself to the community, asking for help, and general chat.

So why guest post? For several reasons including getting your name out there and gaining one or two backlinks to your site. Sure, the latter can be exploited therefore make sure that you and your guest have everything understood clearly before proceeding. If you are looking for a guest blogger you will want someone who writes well, contributes unique work, and can add value to your site.

That last requirement is why I haven’t used too many guest bloggers on my customer’s two blogs as the quality of most posts did not measure up. Naturally, that is one reason why you will want to see samples of the blogger’s work first.

My Blog Guest is all about unpaid opportunities, so if you are looking for paid freelance work, then you will need to look elsewhere.

Related Articles

• 5 Reasons to Guest Blog (rubylane.com)
• 4 Reasons Mediocre Doesn’t Cut it With Guest Posting (weblogbetter.com)
• Grow A Blog In 30 Days – One Simple Idea Spark Up Your Blog! (bloggingtips.com)