Monday, September 28, 2009

Entrecard: Great Concept, No Business Plan

The underlying concept of Entrecard was genius: To provide a vehicle where bloggers thoughout the world could interact and advertise Free of charge! To accomplish this, a fictitious economy was created, rewarding members for visiting other sites and advertising. In this, Entrecard's success was unparalleled. At its peak, some estimate that over 30 thousand members participated.

To be truly successful, however, it is important to capitalize on one's efforts.

Unfortunately, it appears that Entrecard failed to create a viable Business Plan which would address the methodology of earning income while providing its founding services.

As if in a panic, Entrecard resorted to selling membership ad space and delivering it to the captive membership. This resulted in alienaiting members and losing its base.

Under new Entrecard ownership, the paid ads were eliminated, and membership began to grow again. But, not having a Business Plan, Entrecard is reinstituting their Paid Ad delivery system. It was initially planned to be implemented beginning September 28th 2009, but, this date is now pushed back to the week of October 5th.

The new system will occupy 15% of the network inventory. If, however, a member wishes to opt out, he can pay $50 per year to be ad free.

Reading the comments in their blog, members have mixed opinions about this whole thing. And we did too.

So, we decided to analyze what this means:
  1. Entrecard allows members to receive credits for dropping on 300 sites maximum.
  2. Assuming that a member meets this maximum 300 days of the year, there will be 90,000 ad impressions that one visits.
  3. Multiplying 90K times 15%, the user will be exposed to 13,500 ad impressions.
  4. Since one can opt out for of the 13,500 impressions for $50, we calculate that Entrecard expects ad impressions to cost $3.7037 per 1000 impressions.
  5. We think this is a lot of money!
Another way of looking at this is by membership:
  1. If 1,000 members agree to pay $50, Entrecard receives $50,000
  2. If 10,000 members agree to pay $50, Entrecard receives $500,000
Wow, Entrecard can get a lot of money from a captive audience!

So what do we think? Entrecard will continue to be the sought after delivery vehicle for New Bloggers who are trying to build an audience and learn the ropes.

However, seasoned members will go elsewhere for their primary audience. Why?
  1. As time goes by, followers are developed.
  2. Bloggers begin to willingly purchase Paid Ads on other networks.
  3. As they grow, they will devote more time to their content, and less to dropping.
  4. Most blogs derive income from displaying ads.
 Since a blog's ad space is valuable, why  would one display Entrecard for free?

And, if one already purchases their own ads, why would they want to display Entrecard's for free?

Based on this simple economic evaluation, we believe that Entrecard does not have a Business Plan of their own. At present, they are simply attempting to piggy-back on others. This type of strategy will not succeed since it is simply parasitic.

While we will not be dropping Entrecard from our arsonal, we will be demoting their widgets to less important portions of our blogs. Many others may just drop them flat out. This means that the expected revenue that Entrecard is hoping to get will not be there, because advertisers will not want to  pay top dollar for poor quality ad space!


JL...............

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Blogger Releases an Updated Editor

Today we decided to review our Blogger Basic settings and discovered a new Global Settings option:

An Updated Editor

Blogger's latest features help link describes all of the important features that were implemented and released in celebration of Blogger's 10th year birthday!

If you are a Blogger user, you can enable the new editor by going to your blogs Settings | Basic tab. Just about near the bottom you will see the "Select post editor" label with the "Updated editor" option.  Simply click on this new option, and save your settings! Then you're done.

Many of the enhancements and improvements include:
  • Improved Image Handling
  •  Improved Raw HTML editing
  • Geotagging your posts
  • Vertical resizing
  • Easier link editing
  • Safari 3 support
  • A new Preview dialog
  • Placeholder image for tags
  • New Toolbar

From just this short time using this new editor, we have found it to be immensely more friendly and easier to use. We suggest all of you give it a try!

Thanks Blogger & Happy Birthday!

JL..................

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Security Alert - SiteHoppin.com

!!! Caution !!!

When we visited our site LotteryPowerPicks.com on Sunday, we were surprised to see an anti-virus warning in one our our 125x125 widgets. It was in place of sitehoppin.com.

Having been a victim of malicious hackers in the past, we take these warnings seriously, because we want to protect both: our site; and, the computers of our visitors. Therefore, we immediately removed the link from our site.

SiteHoppin.com is (and has been) a popular site with bloggers & website owners because of its potential for referring visitors. Thus, we were surprised to see that the safety this site was compromised.

Using a different computer today, we performed a Google search for "sitehoppin". As expected, it is the first listing returned. Immediately under the title, is a warning, saying that this site may be harmful to your computer. Clicking on the site's URL will bring you to a Google "Warning" page, again stating that this site may harm you computer.

If you or your site is a sitehoppin.com member, we recommend that you:
  • DO NOT click on any of the sitehoppin.com logos displayed
  • DO NOT go sitehoppin
  • REMOVE all links to sitehoppin.com that you may have placed on your site
  • REMOVE the sitehoppin toolbar if you have installed it
  • DO NOT download (or save) any of the images from that site
  • RESIST the temptation to add your site or blog to sitehoppin.com

We recommend that you follow this advice until the site's safety is restored. When it is, we will write a follow-up to this post.

JL......

Footnotes:
  1. We are writing this post as a precaution to the PC security of our fellow bloggers. It is not our intention to degrade this site, but to simply alert visitors of potential problems.
  2. In Google, if you do a search for sitehoppin.com you will see the warning below its title: This site may harm your computer.
  3. For additional information, you may visit the site: StopBadware.org
  4. Lastly, consider joining badwarebusters.org and become an active safety advocate.

Monday, September 7, 2009

Enjoy Your Labor Day Holiday

Today is Labor Day! A day to relax and enjoy. A day to celebrate our working force and to pray that the economy recovers so that all unemployed can go back go work soon.

To many, today is a day of joy. To others, today is a day of sadness.

But, let us not despair. We have gone through cycles and this is one of them.

And everytime, we have come out of them with unparalleled growth and posperity!

So to all, we wish you an enjoyable holiday and encouragement. We all will make it through these tough times!

Be safe, and enjoy!

JL..........
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