Posted 5/16/08 - Kellex


"Tiiiiiiiime is on my side, yes it is!" That's right folks! The 7500+ Farewell to Entrecard - Credit Giveway is over and we have all the time in the world to work on other traffic building methods!

We had amazing participation and have realized how many of you really love this damn Entrecard thing and also that you will do whatever it takes to grab a big sum of credits. I hope the spending of these massive amounts of credits goes towards something useful, like an ad on The Sports Dollar or Le Basketbawl. (Hah)

Thank you to everyone who participated in our biggest contest ever. I'm glad we could share our wealth of Entrecard experience and bank of credits with you, but we are so damn happy to be moving on. With that said, let's get to it!

The participation was great enough that we ended up with right around 11,000 credits to dispurse. That is a pretty significant amount if you ask me.

The winners...of the first and last 7500+ Farewell to Entrecard - Credit Giveway are...

• 1st Place - Blogging Over Coffee - 8250 credits!

• 2nd Place - X3tech.com - 2200 credits!

• 3rd Place - Make a Pound - 550 credits!

Thanks again to everyone who participated! We will not be removing the Entrecard widget, so feel free to continue to purchase ads as we will keep accepting them. You have seen the last of us for a while dropping cards, but you never know, if the service changes for the better, we could be back!


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Posted 5/12/08 - Kellex

I wanted to give everyone an update to our more than fabulous Farewell to Entrecard – Credit Giveaway! We are sitting at a whoppin’ 8700 credits right now and should easily hit that 10,000 credit mark by the end of the week. (Assuming that I hold up my part of the bargain and drop 300 per day until the end, we’ll obviously be right there.)

But why not shoot for more!? Since we’ll definitely get to the 10,000 number, why don’t we aim for 12,000? The more people that participate in the contest, drop their cards on us, and continue to share the word will only make this goal even more attainable. What do you all think? Is 12,000 Entrecard credits possible? I think so!

Right now the prize payout will look like this:

-1st Place – 7500 Entrecard Credits
-2nd Place – 2000 Entrecard Credits
-3rd Place – 500 Entrecard Credits

If you guys work together and can get this number up to 12,000 we’ll have a ton more to give away to 2nd and 3rd. Let’s see how big we can make this thing people! I’d like to see the prize latter look more like this:

-1st Place – 8000 Entrecard Credits
-2nd Place – 3000 Entrecard Credits
-3rd Place – 1000 Entrecard Credits

Wouldn’t that be amazing?



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Posted 5/6/08 - Kellex

We’ve decided it’s time to try and explode this new Sports Blogging for Money niche! There are now 3-4 blogs that are looking at this new idea and we all think we’ve hit the goldmine. This may be true, but how are we really to know unless we take things to the next level?

The sports blog world is almost like a fraternity when you think about the strength it has together. Many blogs have created communication channels and made some great friends that they interact with daily or even hourly. Sports bloggers look to each other for ideas and are usually pretty good at accepting feedback about their work when approached the right way. They have also been known to back the hell out of each other, especially when they are attacked by anyone in the main stream media. (See Colin Cowherd or Buzz Bissinger!)

You will also notice that sports bloggers love to see each other succeed. Many sports bloggers look to their friends for Diggs, Hypes and Barks on almost any story they submit. I find myself submitting my best stories to the same people because I know they will give me some love. They of course turn around and send theirs to me knowing the same thing will happen back.

What does all this sound like? It sure as hell sounds like any other blogging community doesn’t it? The Online Money Makers are exactly the same way aren’t they? They form communication channels and work to help each other grow by commenting, digging, and spreading each other’s word. There are so many likenesses between the two, and we would love to help the sporting world realize it. (Tastefully, of course.)

Our Next Goal:

To gather as much participation as we can from various top sports blogs on their successes in blogging. In our opinion, sports bloggers are some of the best at growing a blog and we’d love to have them share their ideas. They are so passionate about what they do that they seem to make all the right moves without consciously understanding what it is they are doing at times.

It will be amazing to open the minds of some of the best sports bloggers in the world to see what they have to offer. I’m guessing that many will say, “Huh? What are you talking about?” when I ask them to tell me how they generated all those linkbacks and that massive PageRank. These top sports bloggers have so much to offer to all of us and they may not even realize that. If we can open their minds to our vision, we may see sports blogging climb to a new level.

This truly is just the beginning…

This post brought to you by the PepperJAM Network and Review ME!

Posted 5/1/08 - Kellex


What? Farewell?

It's time for a change! It's a new month, the sun is starting to shine, and I am ending my Entrecard participation! This blog has been up for just over a month now and I've been dropping cards like crazy, day in and day out without receiving much in return.

At one point we had 208 cards dropped on us and things were actually looking pretty good for Entrecard. Well, then they decided to change their ad pricing system and there seems to have been a huge falling off for participation. The Sports section has essentially died as well as the Make Money Online group.

I can easily drag in 100-150 people a day to the site just to drop, but I'm finding the work put in to reach that number is not really worth it. I will continue to drop for 2 more weeks and that's it. I've also purchased our last few ads just to see what may happen and once those have run their course I will stop that activity as well.


What about your credits?

I'd like to give them all away to you! Right now I am sitting at 5000+ credits with 8 ads purchased from us left to run. (That total will obviously go up after the ads are finished running.) I will also try to drop 300 cards everday for the next few weeks just to give it an extra boost. You could easily walk away with 7500+ credits to use to purchase either a ton of ads or maybe even a few big ones!


So how do we win this MOUND of credits Mr. Kellex?

A winner will be decided on May 16th using The Sports Dollar's Super Fancy Lottery System. (I should trademark that biz!)


And how the hell do we enter into this lottery?

The game is easy and you can do any or all of the following to better your chances. You will receive the amount of virtual tickets listed as you complete each task.

• 150 Tickets: Write a short post or blurb about this contest with a minimum of 100 words. Make sure to link back to this post and also state the 7500+ credits somewhere.

• 100 Tickets: Post our 125x125 banner linking back to us somewhere on your blog for the duration of the contest. You can combine this into your short blurb on the contest to kill two birds with one whoppin' stone. (Here is the link to it)
  

• 50 Tickets: Subscribe to our RSS feed. (Sorry long-termies, but you have to be a new subscriber.)

• 10 Tickets: Stumble it! (Idea courtesy of "Blog Me the Money")
  

That's it people! Pretty simple stuff and you could be entered into this within minutes really. Make sure to drop me a comment once you have completed any of the requests so that I know it has been done. (And by the way, when you leave a comment, make sure you have a blog attached to it so I know who the hell you are.)

If you can think of other ways you would like to help promote the contest, please let me know and it may be worth additional tickets.

I will be keeping track of all the tickets up until the last day when we will decide the winner! Thanks for playing!

***UPDATE***UPDATE***

MORE PRIZES!!

We have had a great initial reaction to the contest in just the first couple of days and the totals have been skyrocketing! A suggestion was made to give out consolation prizes and you know what, I think that is a fantastic idea.

Our initial goal was to hit 7500 credits and give those all away, but from the looks of it we could easily hit 10,000! If we hit 10,000 credits by May 16th, then we'll have enough to give out a second and a third place prize! (Prizes will be determined toward the end of the contest.)

So keep spreading the word! The more participation we get, the more credits and chances you'll have of winning!

This post brought to you by the PepperJAM Network and Review ME!

Posted 4/26/08 - Kellex

A toilet: You got it, we’re all full of sh!t most of the time aren’t we?

An apple: You know that saying “an apple a day…”? Well one of the critical rules to blogging is consistency and writing a post or 3 posts per day can be a key to return and future readers.

A Diet Pepsi Max: It’s a fairly new profession that runs at all hours of the day and gives you that “invigorating” feeling every time you post or have a big hit.

A Samsung Juke: A blogger tends to stay up on hip/new/cute technology.

A Uni-ball Signo Pen: Quality rather than quantity is the better method in most cases.

A set of keys: A blogging career can open doors to many things and the time is now to look for them.

A Nalgene bottle: Indestructible? Not quite, but a blogger should be able to fend off nasty comments or worthless spam.

A Kleenex: A blog is a great place to blow all of the junk out of your head and display it.

An id badge: A blog is like a blogger’s online identity. It can grant you access to things not available to everyone else.

A pair of Diesel jeans: Many bloggers come off as elitist and they definitely use blogging as a way to show off.

A cubicle: Sometimes we all find ourselves trapped in a little world. Opening our minds and channels once in a while could produce great benefits.

A piece of Orbit gum: The new version of a blogger is clean, neat and refreshing. The days of the kid in “Mom’s basement” are over.

An Emergen-C: We may not fix all the problems in the world, but we definitely think we can.

A flash drive: “On the go” doesn’t do a blogger justice, but the times of working from wherever you are in the world are here.

A Sharpie: A blogger’s mark on the internet is essentially permanent. Now that your work is out there, expect it to be there for a long, long time.

A garbage can: Some times we’ve got more garbage on our blog than actually quality work. Something I think we all need to work on.

A sticky note: Like taking a note and posting it on a bulletin board, only “internet sized.”

A Ford Focus: Starting a blog can be fairly cheap with low maintenance costs, but many out there lack overall long term quality.

An LCD TV: We’ve spent all this time and money and think we are the next big thing, but on the same tolken we’re a little scared of what could replace us sooner than later.

A yellow notepad: We’re not your standard pad or website but we’re also not re-inventing the wheel here.

A conference phone: At any time you could be working 3 articles, responding to 15 comments, and digging/hyping/reddit-ing 20 favorites.

A binder: It’s very easy to maneuver and allows us to easily remove or add material to it.

A rubber band: A blogger’s post can bend just about anyway depending on his/her feeling that day. Sort of like this post. J

A piece of Glad Tupperware: Blogs are used to store information, but they are a much nicer, disposable version that other websites.

A pair of Converse All-stars: Because we all want our blog to be customized to our own style or color scheme.

Reader Added Section:

(The Sports Diva) A mirror: Reading back our own blog post can help bloggers find out who they are.

(Sports Tsar) A cigarette: Once you start, it's hard to kick the habit.

(Juiced Sports Blog) CNN's Hardball: Someone with no training is allowed to have a format to disseminate to the masses and express opinions on topics of which they aren't trained to and not experts.

(Web Design and Development) A hollywood actor: Every blogger thinks they hame some great unique talent and will be recognized and make money from amongst the 200 million other competeing blogs. But in the end, we all still work day jobs.

(Cuzoogle) A cardboard bar coaster: Always attempting to steal someone else's property.

(Blue Workhorse) TNT's NBA in-studio crew (Charles, Kenny, Magic & Ernie): Three people that are full of nonsense who are occasionally funny to one person with any actual information.

Wondering where all these random thoughts came from? I simply looked around at my desk, surroundings and self and spit it out onto a blog. The possibilities are truly endless with this idea. Give me some of yours! Write your idea down in a comment with your backlink and I'll add it the list, linking you!

Posted 4/17/08 - Kellex

Before reading this, you may want to take a look at the Entrecard Experiement Pt. 1!

The results from our little experiment are in! I'm not sure how positive or astounding they are, but they definitely show you some trends and bring up some interesting thoughts. Like is Entrecard really worth the hassle?

We forked out quite a few credits for some of these just before the pricing adjustment was made and some paid off, while others completely flopped. Many of these blogs' advertising price was running strictly off of reputation or obsessive dropping. Now those aren't necessarily bad things, but they factored into our experiment during the purchasing process.

The major goal with this experiment was to determine if forking out credits for the big dogs was really worth it. Did we get new readers or see a spike in traffic on the days that we were advertising on these blogs? Here are the results.

Ben Barden dot com: 114 clicks
The Blog Entrepreneur: 84 clicks
Sports Business Digest: 83 clicks
TSB Magazine: 58 clicks
ProBlogger: 39 clicks
EpiBlogger: 29 clicks
Stephan Miller: 26 clicks
Le Basketbawl: 25 clicks
The Blue Workhorse: 22 clicks
John Chow dot com: 21 clicks
Chris Guthrie: 16 clicks

Interesting enough? You'll probably notice some blogs missing from our initial list and that was because they registered less than 16 clicks to our site. (The Social Millionaire, Tyler Cruz, and Mr. Javo)

As you can see, Ben Barden's site definitely was the big winner here! Very disappointed in the John Chow and ProBlogger results. I really expected a couple of hundred clicks from these sites and they turned out to be flops compared to the credits we forked out for that ad spot.

One thing to keep in mind, is we were using our ugly old 125x125 card that probably had people laughing at it rather than wanting to click it. This was also during a time when Entrecard was making a ton of changes to their advertising pricing as well as some other site adjustments. There was downtime and some confusion which would have all played a role in the weak results.

One high point was seeing our basketball blog come up in the list and beating out John Chow! We didn't expect it to do much but maybe that has to do with it being a sports site? Another factor was obviously the title of our site that is seen on Entrecard. Being called "The Sports Dollar" could discourage many "money making" bloggers as most are not necessarily the biggest sports fans. When they hear "sports" I'm sure most cringe and go back to crunching numbers on there TI-83.

While advertising on the big dogs, we also did not see a jump in drops to our blog. We were hoping with the added traffic, that our drops would jump and our ranking in the "Internet Marketing" niche would climb. That was not the case although, we did work some of our own Entrecard tricks to get into the top 4 there. (Maybe a future post?)

On a side note, we did purchase an ad on John Cow dot com and during our time, his site was hacked/crashed or whatever you want to call it and it killed out chance to see results.

Overall, this process did not work out as planned. With the amount of traffic some of these sites see on a daily basis, we figured the clicks from John Chow or ProBlogger would have been significant. We were obviously wrong!

With the new pricing adjustment made by Entrecard, you may want to be careful purchasing ads on these big dog sites. The pricing is much higher now than it was when we were buying. Make sure you are actually getting a return for the big time credits you will be forking out.

Right now we are testing out the "ad purchasing whore" technique and we'll see what it does. Building up our brand is the most important goal right now and this could be a great way to start.

Let us know if you have any questions or need more details on the experiment!

Posted 4/15/08 - Kellex

What's going on! Today we would like to start out a new idea that we hope will grow into something very entertaining and educational to our readers by allowing them to participate in the content provided through the Sports Dollar.

The idea is pretty simple and should be a lot of fun. We want our readers who have anything to say about the sports blog world or make money online world to write "featured" posts for us that we can display for one week a month!

Basically we'll hold a "wannabe" contest to see who can come up with a great story, tip, review or whatever they want that has to do with either sports, sports blogging or making money online. (The "wannabe" part will be me approving the best of the best!) We'll take 5 of the articles and have a "featured" post each day for a week and we'll do this once a month. It will be a "Featured Post Week" or something of that sort. (The nifty name will come down the road.)

All articles should be at least 200 words and submitted by April 20th to make this month's featured week. The list of approved articles will be announced at the end of the day on the 20th with the schedule for the upcoming week.

If you have a great article that you wrote last week or last month, feel free to share that! This doesn't have to be absolutely brand new material, although you may want to update it.

This is a win-win situation for all parties! The Sports Dollar will be blessed with some great content from many other amazing writers out there, plus we can share links with each other to help build everyone's traffic and PageRank. (Of course make more money too!)

I know many of our readers want to know some of the best sports or money making blogs in the industry and this is a great way to let them know who you are!

If you are interested drop us a comment or send us an email!

Posted 4/6/08 - Kellex


The Entrecard Credits just seem to be building up in our account these days and we are not in "ad purchasing mode" so rather than let them go to waste, we thought we'd give some away to our readers!

Here is how the deal works!

1. Add the Sports Dollar as Technorati favorite: 10 credits
2. Subscribe to our RSS feed: 20 credits
3. Link to us from your blog: 40 credits
4. Review the Sports Dollar: 150 credits

This wannabe contest will run for one week and at the end of the week (Next Sunday, 4/13) we will be distributing credits to all particpants. This is a no lose situation here people. Jump right in!

Make sure to let us know which and how many of the steps you have completed via comment! (You may want to post links if you have done a review or a linkback.)

Also check out the Entrecard Experiment we are running to see which ads are actually worth spending those hard-earned credits on.

Posted 3/31/08 - Kellex

Entrecard seems to have taken the blog world by storm hasn’t it? Do you feel like you know what the benefit of it is? I sure as hell don’t.

The Sports Dollar is fairly new and from the beginning has been logged onto Entrecard. I’ve taken the time and dropped cards like crazy raising The Sports Dollar up into the top 5 of the sports blogs listed on the site. It did not take a ton of work but it did seem to take on a life of its own after a while. Almost every day I found myself trying to drop more and more cards hoping for a return in order to raise my blog’s advertising rate. Sure enough, it actually worked. (I posted an Entrecard tip you should check out.)

I figured that once my blog had entered into the top 5 of any list it had a chance to drive some extra traffic to my blog as viewers would see it at first glance when entering a site category. That was not really the case I came to find out. It has seen steady traffic, but that is solely due to the fact that I dropped hundreds of cards a day and other bloggers returned the favor.

With my first idea sort of failing, I decided to take on another experiment. What would happen if you purchased Entrecard ad space on the big time blogs such as John Chow, ProBlogger, or even John Cow?

The experiment is set and we’ll see the results within 2 weeks. So far I have purchased space on a few of the big dogs and we’ll see what kind of traffic they can generate for us. Isn’t the true idea of Entrecard to act as a free ad network rather than a drop machine?

Here is the schedule we have set so far:

Blog Entrepeneur: Ad running 4/5
Mom’s Cash blog: Ad running 4/5
ProBlogger: Ad running 4/6
Sports Business Digest: Ad running 4/8
The Social Millionaire: Ad running 4/9
Stephan Miller: Ad running 4/9
Chris Guthrie: Ad running 4/10
Epiblogger: Ad running 4/10
Ben Barden: Ad running 4/11
Adtoll: Ad running 4/11
Mr. Javo: Ad running 4/12
John Cow: Ad running 4/13
Tyler Cruz: Ad running 4/14

(Obviously not all of these are considered 'Big Dogs' but they do all see decent traffic to their sites so we thought we'd give it a shot.)

I’ll be working to get more of the big dogs taken care of, such as John Chow. These spots are obviously in high demand but I’ll keep you updated as I sneak in a purchase here or there.

On a side note, try to keep your other ad purchases to a minimum. If you are not buying space on a big time blog you will not see any traffic. You may be getting your little card out there, but unless the blog is relevant to yours, the EC’s may not be worth it.