This weekly wrap-up post asks one crucial question for all you micro-bloggers — Is there a wrong way to use Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, and all the others? Can you actually alienate yourself from the masses? I have no hard and fast evidence. I know on Twitter there’s a collective of individuals I’m following who “would appreciate you going easy on the spam”. But there are others who quite frequently post links to their own blogs with the intro “Some spam:”.

Micro-blogging works great to network, find answers, build an online brand, and to keep in touch with many people at once. It doesn’t seem to work well when you don’t take the time to introduce yourself to those who follow you, or at least try to interact.

I must admit, I’m often times overwhelmed by Twitter. I’m following many of the top bloggers in the industry, from Mashable to Robert Scoble. These guys are all famous in their own right and quite successful. At times, I feel like what I have to contribute would be inane, so I shut up. Other times I try too hard.  I am who I am though, and my followers understand that. It’s not like they want to me to have all the answers, to be constantly funny, or anything. Most of them don’t even know me. Why not just be myself?

So the wrong way to use Twitter and other Micro-blogging services seems to be when we try to hard and overwhelm our followers. If I just be myself and try to interact with individuals, then 99% of the time I’ll experience a positive result. If I stay in the shadows and let the tweets fly by, then I’m only going to be a small pixelated square on someone’s friends list.

How Not To Start Micro-blogging

There is one other way to start out wrong. It’s poor form to simply start following a thousand people. I’ve seen at least two Twitter users add me this weekend who have less than ten followers, but they’re following over 500 people. That’s crazy! Stop it!

Twitter does have a follow limit of 2,000. Can you imagine 2,000 people in a room? I wouldn’t want to be holding a mic telling those 2,000 people about a great offer on dog food. Stay away from spam. Be yourself.

Other’s Explosions

This week I’ve read a lot of great articles on the web. It’s hard to keep track of everything, but I did want to push some link love to a few of my favorites.

Jamie at Blog2Life.net introduced a stat tracking service called Crazy Egg. The stats track clicks on your site and can show you how traffic responds to certain areas of your blog. I’m going to give the service a try to see where you’re all clicking. I’m watching!

It’s Write Now discussed how to create your own Wordpress template, which can be highly valuable to many bloggers out there. A good series with clear instructions.

Write to Done wrote a post entitled Why You Must Blow Your Trumpet. A great article on how we need to take credit and push our own limits of ourselves.

That’s all for this week. I’ll be writing new Micro-blogging Olympics over the next few days. Stay tuned as I go for gold!

I received the emailed announcement this morning, as all Entrecard members did, that the new toolbar has been released. Is this Sitehoppin? I went to the Entrecard post and read about the new toolbar. It sounded cool. I have a lot of toolbars installed in Firefox and wasn’t too thrilled to add another, but it’s Entrecard, so I made an exception.

The toolbar installed flawlessly, but only works in Firefox 2 and 3 (sorry, IE, Opera, Flock, and other browser fans). I now have the option to view new sites, with the ability to open ten or more at a time, buy ads directly from the site I’m visiting, ad sites to my favorites, brows different categories of blogs, give tips, recommendations, and much more all from my browser. Why did Buzz My Blog appear when I hit the play button with Newest selected? Oh, because I clicked newest blog under my favorites category. Needless to say it took a few minutes to get used to, but it gives me quick access to my profile, and even quicker access to blogs.

You can one click advertise from the toolbar. This means when you visit a site you’ll see the price of an ad listed to the far right in the toolbar. One click of this button and the advert goes into the queue. I tried it on a cheap site. So if I accidentally click the button, I then have to go to my ad queue and cancel the ad. I’m not sure how I feel about this. A second click to confirm might be nice. What do you think?

Verdict? I think it’s great. It might actually get me dropping regularly again. Was the announcement worth the wait? I think so, but who am I? (Sezwho?)

Week in Review

I’m back. I can’t believe I’ve been away this long. I took a vacation from blogging it seems. No reason, just working and getting things done in other areas. I missed this blog though, and all the readers. I can’t imagine selling. Can you? I think I’ve grown too attached to everything, the hours of piddling with the template, the logo, the branding, the thousands of EC drops to promote, the Project Wonderful ads, the comments, articles, all of it! So I’m back and in full effect. I’ll hopefully be doing a podcast soon too.

If you’re new to my site, I like to write about topics that can help bloggers, either to smile or to write on their blogs. I also post reviews of blogs, in my Powder Keg Review series. I’m going to do a review once a week for the month of August. If you want to be considered for the review, please leave a comment. It’s free. I’ll choose a different blog each week. No strings attached.

Explosions from around the Blogosphere

Aside from the awesome Entrecard announcement, there’s been of interesting things going on this week.

The Big Bald Blog continued his Advertising of Yesteryear series with an installment looking at Honda’s 1965 advertising campaign and their earlier You meet the nicest people on a Honda ad campaign. It’s a good read.

Dosh Dosh talked about the key to viral marketing being emotional engagement in a new article. On a side note, I just saw his new site design. Very simple and nice.

Other things happened during the week, like the Problogger site being banned from StumbleUpon. Did you write a fantastic post this week? I’ll be linking to quality writing and entertaining bits every Sunday, so feel free to drop a link in the comments or through Twitter.

I have a lot of enthusiasm for the Internet. The sheer volume of things I can learn really sparks my interest. This is why I do all my work behind a computer, forsaking my eyes and back for an opportunity to learn and invest in website development and blogging. Is there a better way to live?

I’ve been dropping Entrecards this week, trying to softly launch a new website I started. I’m going to showcase the site later on this week, but I’m a little nervous. Here’s why. I thought of the site idea last February. The premise was to help bloggers gauge what’s wrong with their site. [site's trademark secrets removed] Alas, I’m too much of a newb with PHP and MySql to make the site work without spending thousands of dollars I don’t have. I went the more economical route.

I changed the idea, for now. The site is a Yahoo! Answers type site. It’s specifically setup for bloggers. You can ask questions, answer other peoples questions and earn points for doing it. The site is very infantile right now, but it is ready to use. To bootstrap its use, I’m offering 50 EC credits to the users who write the first 50 questions on the site. There’s a limit of five questions a day.

Visit RSS Cop.com - The Blogging Answer’s Site

So my question to you, readers. Do you like the site? What could be improved? Do you think you would use the site? Is it a waste of time? Let me know what you think in the comments section.

It’s Memorial Day weekend. One of my favorite weekends in the whole year. Not simply because I have an extra day off from the office, but for its outdoor appeal. The weekend represents the start of summer, baseball, and the Indy 500.

I’m excited about blogging too. This week saw my resurgence, or my return from hibernation. I provided everyone with a look at a great upcoming blog and also discussed my Pagerank of 4. I have also seen my subscriber numbers increase from my previous highs. At one point this week, I crested the 100 subscriber mark.

Going Round the Track

I’ve had a minor dilemna recently. I seem to want to write about what I’ve already written. I come up with ideas and think, well I did that with this or that article. The experience has caused me to start writing three blog posts and then stop. It seems my ideas have come full circle. So I’ve decided to buckle up for the ride to see where my topics take me. Why not put a new spin on an old idea, right?

Upcoming Explosions

One of the three posts I’ve started will be called Blogging and Stand Up Comedy. Stay tuned for that this week. We’ll also get you all a chance to win some bucks for May, even though it’s late. I’ll post the contest tomorrow.

I’m looking for guest post opportunities as well. I need to up my traffic numbers. If you want to know how to lose traffic, just simply leave blogging for five weeks. The results won’t be what you want. I have a lot of work to do to get back where I was. Consistency is the key. I’ll keep you all updated on my progress. Until next time…

This week saw the most significant change in the Entrecard community to date. They altered the ad rate formula from counting drops as part of the equation to only counting demand for your ad space. The new systems seems to have kicked up a lot of dust.  Once all that settles, it appears to be a far superior method for calculating cost.

In a comment on the Entrecard forums, Phirate (the programmer behind Entrecard) states this:

The new system is simply better overall. You can still work hard and get your ad price to increase, but now the work you do on your blog counts just as much as the work you do on Entrecard - the value reflects not just the number of drops you’re likely to get, but the buyers assessment of how much your blog can help them as well. [Source: Entrecard Forums]

I would have to agree. When this whole change was implemented, I had 8 ads in my queue and my price was 512 ECs. Since the change I have had two people purchase ads on my site and today my price hovers at 128 ECs. When I look at Problogger’s ad space, I see his cost at 8,192 ECs. I see this as fair. At one point, my ad space cost more than Probloggers. This concern caused John Cow to stop Entrecard and irked other bloggers as well. Why not do it this way?

How Does it Work?

The new ad systems works well, giving users a way to earn currency and an actual marketplace dictated by peers. The economy will beat down smaller site’s ad prices and bolster ad costs on popular blogs. The new ad pricing post on Entrecard details the changes in a better way than I could.

To calculate your price at any given moment, just start at 2 credits, and double it for everyone waiting for an ad on your site. For example, if you have 5 people approved and stacked in the “On your widget” column of the dashboard, and 5 people waiting for approval, you would calculate 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2, or 2 to the power of 10, which eqauls 1024 credits. And then in 24 hours, when an ad has completed running, their price would go down to 512. If no one bought an ad that day, tomorrow it would go down to 256. And then if someone bought an ad for 256, the price would go back up to 512. [Source: Entrecard Blog Post]

I know this change turned a lot of people off to Entrecard. It’s still the great service it was before, but now it’s based in reality. I’m not going to pay a premium price for an ad spot simply because the owner of the site spent an hour each day dropping cards. That shouldn’t even factor into the equation. I for one am glad it’s been changed.

It was a shock at first. I must admit seeing ad prices into the stratosphere really tipped me off to the change. Now that it’s here — what do you think? Do you like it? Have you dropped Entrecard?

Weekly Explosions

It’s been another hectic week. I did manage to post twice this week. I am truly engaged by the amount of money blogs are selling for these days. The John Cow site sold the other day for 50K. He accomplished that in a meer 9 months or so. It was a truly unique site though. I tipped my hat to the sale earlier this week.

The other post focused on death and what should be done with our online lives. I think a lot of times we talk about our reputation online for career purposes, but we often times leave out the part about after we die. I don’t know much about what happens after death, but I’m fairly certain I can’t take Twitter with me. There has to be some way to help our loved ones out in that troubling times. It’s why I wrote the post. I’ll start talking about flowers and sunshine again soon. Promise.

Other’s Explosions

For those who know Arnold, his site ChalkisCheap has gone down forever. He hosted the recipro-drops community. We dropped on each other’s sites daily. His site was hacked and he decided he didn’t want to bring it back up again. I was sorry to see him go.

Yimto keyed me in on a new RSS day. The idea is to write about, tweet, and otherwise barrage your readers with information about RSS on May 1st — the official RSS day. Dailyblogtips.com came up with the idea and they’re asking everyone to help them get the word out. So here I am telling you. It’s like Arbor day without the trees.