PagedLife

There is a lot of buzz around Entrecard and its benefits and its downfalls. A lot of people sign up to become part of a community, for interaction with other like minded bloggers, and to find new friends. Even more people sign up just to drive traffic to their blogs, and a lot of people question the quality of traffic they receive. I have read many bloggers complaining about the traffic, the waste of valuable advertising space, and the bounce rate they receive from Entrecard.

I just signed up for Entrecard three days ago, and I have been interacting with the community, monitoring how much I put into the service and how much it gives back, and examining the traffic I do receive from them. Overall it has been a fun and informative experience, and I have found a few new blogs that I really do enjoy.

The last two days I have received 15 hits each day from Entrecard, and the bounce rate has been 88.46%. I am sure many of these people are just coming to drop there card and receive more EC credits, but some of them are staying and looking around. As far as people complaining about the bounce rate, my opinion is that any traffic is good traffic, and I look at the bright side, 11.54% of the people are staying and looking around! My blog is also coming back from a period of hibernation, so right now the majority of my traffic is bounced, although it doesn’t have quite the bounce rate as Entrecard referrals have. As a comparison though, my bounce rate from Stumbleupon is near 90%.

In regards to the wasted ad space, for me I wanted to wait awhile before I monetized my blog, and the number of readers I have now are not sufficient to make monetization an issue. Instead of looking at it as ad space, I think people should look at it as a link to a community portal, a community the should actively belong to and try and participate in to make it better. Besides, if its that big of an issue, put the Entrecard at the bottom of your blog pages, we can always make the pager longer!

Over all I am happy with the experience, and although I don’t think I will get a lot of traffic or readers from being a part of the program, I still like being part of the community, and the few readers I do get from Entrecard are worth having the badge on the side and being a part of something bigger!

Smashing Magazine puts together yet another great list of well-designed blogs. Very inspirational and some really unique designs made the cut.

read more | digg story

Edit:  This post was made from using Digg’s ‘Blog it’ feature.  Normally I will not add content like this, but the designs showcased in this blog are excellent and I felt that people would benefit from seeing the creativity and idea’s that went behind designing some of these blogs.  Click ‘read more’ and check it out!

I want to tell everybody about the new service I found today called Jott. Jott has the ability to dictate messages over the phone and E-mail them or post them to your blog. I’m currently driving home in my car talking on my cell phone and writing this blog entry. Jott seems to be a great program and I’m testing this out for the first time. When I get home I will edit this entry and have a links for the Jott homepage along with the scree shot, but so far the service seems great. listen

Powered by Jott

Edit: This was my very first time using Jott, and as you can see from the above post it did very well. You can even listen to my dictation with the listen link. The only problem I saw was it mispelled “screen” as “scree”.

It is actually a little harder then I thought to blog in traffic, but Jott actually makes blogging in traffic a reality. Jott allows you to dictate a message and email it, or send it to different services like wordpress. This would be a wonderful tool to be able to Blog while at conventions, or to do interviews with people for your blog. I won’t be using it for every blog post, but I will definitely be using Jott again in the future.

I also found out that it takes the first line and truncates it to use as the Title of your post or Subject of your email. Overall I think Jott did very well for my first time using it!

I found another very useful online tool today called Kwout. Kwout allows you to take a screenshot of any website by using its URL and it will maintain an image map with clickable links for the actual links on the website. You can even crop the screenshot! Here is a sample of a screenshot of there homepage, and notice that the “FireFox Addon” link is clickable from within the screenshot!

kwout | A brilliant way to quote via kwout

Since my Blog was down for so long I have lost a lot of traffic and all of my PageRank. This drove me to search for free directories so I could submit PagedLife and raise my PR and SERPs resulting in more traffic hopefully.

In my search I ran across a page on vmoptions.com with a huge Free Directory List. You can sort the list by PR or date added, and it makes your job MUCH easier when looking for good free SEO friendly web directories. I started to submit PagedLife to a bunch today, and I figured I’ll start submitting to maybe 5-10 a night casually for the next few days.

Give it a try, spend 10 minutes a night submitting to Free Directories, all it can do is help your PR and SERPs!

Leave a comment if you have some good Free Directories that are not on that list!

Many of you know my main business is Think411.com my web hosting company, the same servers that PagedLife resides. I have decided to try and monetize some additional services and have opened up several free services.

I have recently opened up IMG.gd a Free Image Host and Host.gd a Free Web Host. IMG.gd is currently monetized with only ads on the first page and Host.gd is not monetized at all, I decided I did not want to force ads on the free hosting clients.

I did however find a way to monetize Host.gd without producing ads on any clients pages, and without ads on the site at all. This method could be deployed in either a White Hat, Grey Hat or Black Hat method and so far is doing quite well.

I opened Host.gd about a week ago, and with very little promotion (only promoted on DP and WebHostingTalk) I have only gained 19 clients, some from search engines. Even if I decided I wanted to force ads, with this little amount of free hosting clients I would not be making anything at all.

Originally I was going to sell Host.gd on Digital Point, however I recently found found a new way to monetize the site, and the first day I made $1.20 and today, the second day of monetizing the site I made $2.16!

I am currently doing this in a White Hat way using adsense and it is working very good, I am going to continue testing this and if all goes well I may write an eBook on this method and sell it as I have not seen this idea anywhere. This method could easily be used in a White Hat, Grey Hat or Black Hat method and I think would do very good in all three ways for free webhosts.

This method is so simple and so perfect I can not believe no one has tried this. It does not affect the clients at all and does not break any adsense rules.

I may give more details in the coming days, currently I want to test this for some time and see if the results stay constant.

Has anyone else come across incredible ways to monetize there sites without affecting the end users in anyway?

The site was down for a very long time.  I migrated the site to another server of mine, and in the process did not make a backup and corrupted the database.  We all make mistakes oh well!

I was thinking of trying to repair the database by hand, but I have been so busy with other projects lately that the blog has been down for 4 months now and I even lost all my PR, but I think it will be neat to start over again.

More to come soon!