Social Networking using Entrecard

I finally had the opportunity to install my Entrecard widget on this site and so far I’ve had nothing but a positive experience with the system. With high profile blogs such as ProBlogger and John Chow using the widgets, I figured I should give it a shot. I was pleasantly rewarded in less than 24 hours with some increased traffic and exposure.

The Entrecard site itself is very user friendly. Once you familiarize yourself with the dashboard it takes just a few clicks to purchase ad space (using credits earned off the site) and/or sell an exclusive spot on your site. Your banner will run for a period of 24 hours and with enough credits its actually possible to land a advertising spot free of charge on several reputable sites.

I highly recommend Entrecard to anyone interested in increasing traffic and exposure of their sites. Its only takes a few minutes to sign up and set up your personal widget and ads. I know it was definitely worth my time.

Problogger actually has a really good write up on Entrecard effectiveness in increasing comments on your site, boosting your Alexa rank, and attracting more RSS subscribers.

Optimizing my WordPress Blog

iheartwordpresssignI visited Jaypee today and he posted a very interesting utility called Xinu. Basically, it gives you all types of information about your blog such as pagerank, backlinks and website syndication just to name a few.

While I had a very decent Google Pagerank and positive diagnosis for 7milesdown’s description, title and URL (using the All in One SEO pack plugin for wordpress), I noticed that it lacked in many important areas to get the proper exposure on the web. With this in mind, over the next few hours I spent my time searching the internet and looking for ways to help optimize my site.

The very first problem I discovered was that my blog was in a subdirectory. I really dislike the clutter of setting up wordpress in the root of my server so I placed it in a folder called “/wp“. This was a bad move. I wish I had known more about SEO or Search Engine Optimization before I started this blog. You can read this article for more details on this.

As for my solution to the problem it wasn’t very simple. Originally, I had a redirect from my root to my subdirectory using a simple redirect script in HTML. I finally decided it was in my best interests to allow access to my blog using the root instead of “7milesdown/wp”. I didn’t however want to lose all the traffic I’ve generated from almost three years online, so what I did was kept the install in the subdirectory while allowing access from the root by following these instructions. It seems to have worked out pretty well. I had to adjust my permalinks to mirror the changes made, but it was pretty simple to do and things seem to be working fine. While doing this, I found out my two sentence post on the postal service exam is ranked sixth when you type in Postal Service Exam. Who knew?

There is still quite a bit of work to be done but I’m happy with what I accomplished so far. My next step is to try to monetize this site like John Chow did with Jonchow.com less than a year ago. Its hard to believe he is making over $10,000 a month off one blog alone! Simply amazing. If I could make just $1000.00 extra per month I’d be ecstatic, wouldn’t you??