www.affiliateconfession.com

Microsoft AdCenter has been running a great promotion for some time now, I think since January, where you can get $75 in free clicks if you are a new user. (You may just be able to open a new account with a different credit card. I haven’t checked that out though.) However, the promotion is ending as of June 30th, so you only have 2 more weeks to take advantage of free advertising.

Through personal experience and what I’ve read on some blogs, the MS AdCenter interface tends to be a little difficult to use. It is a lot less user friendly than the Google Adwords interface, but while some see that as a disadvantage, you could look at it in a different light. Less people will be using it, giving you a better opportunity to take advantage of their search network. Other people, such as Jeremy Palmer, refer to both Microsoft Adcenter and Yahoo Search Marketing as the hidden gems of PPC advertising because less advertisers use them and in some cases the traffic tends to convert better, especially from MS Adcenter.

Regardless of how easy they are to use or how well they convert, it’s always nice to get free advertising from a PPC search network. 

If you want to take advantage of this offer, you can visit Microsoft Adcenter to get $75 in free clicks until June 30th.

I learned a lesson in the last several days that I assume could have been much worse. Sometimes no matter what you hear or read about, you just have to try something for yourself. It’s probably a good idea to follow the advice you read about in some cases rather than being the Lone Ranger and doing it your way.

Case in point, I recently bought a text link on a very high profile blog, which will remain nameless, and thought I would get some traffic and maybe a little PR juice as well. Needless to say, I ignored the most recent advice I heard from Jeremy Palmer, I believe it was through the Black Ink Project, in an online session. Jeremy remarked that he thought he would boost some of his sites by buying text links and ended up getting them all penalized and losing some serious rankings.

Of course I thought, that’s Jeremy, Google knows about him because he’s a big shot, I’m just a medium order of fries, they don’t know about me. Wrong!

I don’t get a lot of traffic from Google here at Affiliate Confession, but it is enough that I don’t want to lose it, mainly because it is a source of ever changing new traffic. The 30 or 40 organic searchers that Google sends my way every day come from a huge variety of long tail keywords that are pretty diverse in the niches they come from. I jeopardized that traffic last week when I purchased the text link on May 28th and only 3 days later my traffic from Google dropped by 80% as you can see below:

Luckily I realized what was going on the second day after purchase and immediately converted that text link to an affiliate offer. It took a couple of days for the link to change, but when it did, the traffic returned to normal. I’m thinking I didn’t do any long term damage to this blog because I caught what was happening in time and changed it in just a couple of days. My strategy for buying text links now is to either use them only for affiliate offers or to experiment with links on lower profile sites sending traffic to sites that I can afford to do without. I’ll probably just stick with affiliate offers though.

Sometimes you just have to do something stupid before you realize how stupid it is. Don’t be stupid.

Lots of things are changing at Entrecard besides their new home page design. One of the changes they recently made that’s really the most significant since Entrecard’s inception is that you can now add multiple blogs to your account up to as many as you want. For those that don’t know, Entrecard is a blog widget advertising system.

You can add other blogs to your Entrecard account in one of two ways. You can either just simply add a new blog to your main Entrecard account or you can link accounts together. Many people have added Entrecard to their multiple blogs by creating individual accounts, so if you now have 3 or 4 accounts, you can merge them all together which will make keeping track of multiple email addresses and passwords a thing of the past. This is a very good move on Entrecard’s part.

And to encourage you to add additional blogs to your account, Entrecard is having a drawing for 15,000 credits in each of 5 different levels of adding multiple blogs to your account. If you add anywhere from 2 to 25 blogs you will get a chance to win one of 5 drawings for those 15,000 credits. That many credits can get you a bunch of advertising and will bring a decent amount of traffic to your blog.

Entrecard has also come out with an ebook as well and I know you’re probably thinking, what do we need an Entrecard ebook for, all we need to do is click, drop and buy advertising, how difficult is that? I thought the same thing, but found out the ebook does have a lot of good info in it. One thing I learned was that clicking on the Entrecard logo on the Entrecard widget on someones blog will take you to their profile. I’ve been wondering how I could quickly advertise on someone’s blog I like, without having to search Entrecard to find them. Here’s your answer.

I still wish Entrecard ads would run for 48 hours instead of 24 because I think it would be much more economical for the time spent on finding good advertising, but I am pretty impressed with the amount of features they keep adding to the service. Unlike many other blog widget deals, the constant development and tweaking of Entrecard is a big plus.

If you aren’t a member of Entrecard, you can join here and you can get the details of all their new features and the contest on their blog here.

I don’t spend that much time doing the Entrecard thing any longer, but I do occasionally drop a card here and there and buy an advertising spot when I have a few spare minutes. I think people are beginning to see that the time spent with Entrecard is not really paying off because it’s a lot of work for a little benefit.

But I will give things one more shot here because I just won 10,000 credits in a contest John Chow was sponsoring over at his blog. That’s a lot of credits and it can buy a ton of advertising, so it will probably be worth the time go through the blogs in my niche at Entrecard, finding good ones and spend them all to see if I can increase my traffic for a couple of weeks. It would take you 33 days to earn that many credits just by dropping 300 cards per day. Of course you will earn more credits than that in 33 days because of drops on you and credits earned through accepting advertising on your blog, it’s just an illustration of how out of kilter things are at Entrecard.

My initial thought is to not spend that much time at all and just go for the lowest priced blogs in a massive sweep of 600 ads or so. I’m probably going to do that and then hit up a few of the higher priced blogs for a little wider exposure.

After I spend all the credits I’ll report back on the results.

I’m souring on Entrecard as of late because it consumes an inordinate amount of time in relation to the actual benefits it provides. But, if you want to take earning credits by mindless card dropping out of the equation and save some time, then head over to John Chow’s blog for a chance to win $10,000 Entrecard credits he is giving away.

John has managed to accumulate more than 18,000 credits and is giving away 10,000 of them. Bloggers like John who get around 5,000 to 6,000 visitors a day have no trouble earning a huge amount of Entrecard credits, because everyone wants to drop their card on John and everyone wants to advertise on his blog. But those of us that don’t get quite the amount of traffic the Dot Com Mogul does have to mindlessly drop cards to earn lots of credits.

Entrecard does have it’s advantages in that if you earn enough credits, you can eventually advertise on high profile blogs like John’s or Problogger of which I just submitted an advertising request at 2,048 credits. This does allow those that don’t have a very big advertising budget to get some great exposure, but you have to work quite hard for only a singe day’s worth of advertising. This has been my biggest beef with Entrecard, the fact that your advertising on any one blog lasts a scant 24 hours. You can see my Massive Entrecard Advertising Experiment Results for more on how much time Entrecard consumes for the benefit it provides.

Okay, I’m off my rant now. So, if you want to avoid a lot of work earning credits and would like a chance to win 10,000 credits for free, check out John’s contest.