Well, I did 2 things last night and one was tracking down a new Wordpress Theme and the other was to purchase the OIOpublisher. I’m not sure yet if I like this theme, but it’ll do till I work on the other 3 that I found. I installed a testing blog that I use to mess around with the different themes and when they look ok I bring them here, but invariably because I have different things going on with this blog I always have to change something. I’m quite sure unless you visit me regularly you wont notice a thing and if you are a regular visitor I apologise if you feel lost.

I bought the plugin because I wanted to easily be able to add some sort of different advertising and this makes it very easy because it’s set so anyone can upload their 125×125 banner and pay through PayPal or use Entrecard credits to purchase a spot for a month. The really good part is that I can use this plugin on all of my blogs and I can easily change how I want it to appear. There are many different ways you can use it and different types of modules for earning money and you can even set it to no-follow if you’re concerned about Google, but for now I am only doing the side banners.

I’m not very technical as my friends already know, but I stubbornly refuse to give up and I managed to install it on all 3 of my blogs, but this is the only one that I managed to get set up partially. Now all I have to do is wait for them to review my blog and give me the API to insert. I certainly wish I had studied IT or something computer related when I went back to school. People that can write code can make a fortune, I certainly hope one of the Grandkids is going to be geeky so they can help me when I get really ancient.

As you can well imagine the members of Entrecard have mixed emotions about the things that are going on there right now and many are losing trust and feel like Entrecard is going down. I personally think that they are trying hard to survive and by purchasing the plugin through their partnership with OIOpublisher I think this will help them turn around and make it stronger for everyone. So I guess in a way we are pulling together to bail them out or at least I feel like I’m trying to help them survive. If the plugin doesn’t prove profitable that will just be one more thing to add to my list.

I refuse to read a blog that is filled with paid posts, where every other one is an advertisement regardless if the person writing it is relating to the post from experience or not. Don’t get me wrong I do paid posting myself, but there will never be one right after the other and I get so sick of seeing debt consolidating posts or anything about credit cards.

I honestly think well over half of the bloggers that use Entrecard are paid posters so of course they don’t read blogs that are all ads unless some one is cheating. I have only found one blatant cheater since I’ve been dropping and couldn’t believe my eyes. I’m sure if a paid post catches a bloggers eye they may leave a comment, but not many paid posters will leave a comment on a paid post.

There are a lot of good bloggers out there that make extra money doing paid posting and those are not the blogs I am refering to. The majority are very poorly written blogs and you can’t even understand what they are talking about. If I went through the list of blogs and eliminated those then there would be no one to drop on. I can certainly understand when people think we are sell outs when those bad blogs are the only ones they see.

From what I understand the Izea team are doing a sweep of blogs and eliminating a lot of splogs so maybe that will help the bad image that paid posters have recieved at least I hope so. I personally like doing the opps that I run across that are helpful to other bloggers and it doesn’t hurt that they pay me a couple dollars for my words, in fact it also gives me something to blog about at times.

I have ran across many useful services that I might never have known about before thanks to Izea and Social Sparks. I have seen some bloggers recently posting about being turned down from using Izeas services so I guess they are now being a little more critical of the blogs that use their services and personally I think that’s a good thing.

At Christmas Cards Direct you can order any type of holiday business cards to send to associates, clients and your employees and it’s a very good way to advertise your business and spread good will especially during those hectic times when people are stressing over so many things, you can give someone a smile and keep your business in their mind. I always love when they send me those calendars and it never bothers me that their advertisement is on there.

Business Christmas Cards would be an excellent way to show your clients that you care. I know most big businesses do send out holiday greetings, but the smaller businesses sometimes deem this as too expensive and simply don’t allow money for this type of thing in their budget, but they should and you can customize the look and feel and add your company logo. Most people set up their Christmas cards so everyone can see them and enjoy them so make sure yours will be among them.

Today was the first day ever that I actually took a SocialSpark assignment. Someone had a friends request in so I went there to approve it and looked around. I saw a SS opportunity that was agreeable with me so I checked on it and it was actually open without having to queue for it so I did it. It was also a free service that I signed up for because it just made sense.

I have been reading so many blogs lately that claim to be SS rejects and I am very surprised at some of the rejections because I enjoy reading their blogs and all I can think is that maybe the reviewers really don’t know what they are doing. Bloggers can use SS and make posts knowing that they are totally within Goggles guidelines. Even Matt Cutts says SS is acceptable in this format.

All of the links are nofollow so Google wont penalize you for link selling. I don’t like standing in lines at grocery stores so I definitely don’t like having to stand in line for an opp at one price and have it drop to nothing when it’s available to me. So if it’s not open for me to take at the price advertised when I look I will pass until I find one that is and that I can honestly write about it.

I have noticed that I have a problem embedding videos because the code changes when I save it even if I’m using the code instead of visual part so I save everything up to the video part as I’m writing and then when I am ready to publish the post I add the embed video code and click publish and that takes care of my embed problem. As those of you that know me know I have never been very technical, but I always find a solution that works for me.

I have also rearranged this blog so all of the social programs that I use are on the left hand side and all of my blog information is on the right hand side except for the meta info which I moved to the top left just to sort of balance the sides. I hope it doesn’t look too lopsided, but it will have to do for now because I wanted my EC card to be seen right off the bat for those that don’t have time to read and for those that are featured here.

Just to make sure that my last post was understood. I don’t put anyone down for using blogger unless your a marketing expert and can’t even afford your own domain. I simply made an observation after blogger went down and realised how many bloggers actually used that platform and most are excellent bloggers. I simply wanted to know the percentage of Blogger Blogs in EC’s system.

There were a number of comments that sort of made me feel like I was inferring that they weren’t good bloggers because they choose to use that platform and that wasn’t what I meant at all. At any rate how anyone chooses to blog or no matter what platform they are using they obviously want visitors otherwise why join EC and drop your card? I simply don’t understand why they bother if they aren’t going to update and as was pointed out to me, I should simply find those that do..

Do you get offended when you try to advertise on someones blog and they decline you? When I first started with EC it bothered me at first and I would go visit their site and try to figure out why they thought their blog was so much better than mine. Of course when I first started I also declined some blogs for whatever reason and then I realized that it didn’t really matter so unless they are really offensive I pretty much accept all.

I am not a prejudiced person and I really don’t care what another persons lifestyle is and I feel bad about one blogger that I denied on my Pappy and Nana site just because of the way he had the wording on his card. I couldn’t have any of the Grandchildren seeing that and not understanding that it wasn’t a statement that I was making and that it was someone else and asking me questions that I think they are too young to understand.

I did send a message to this blogger to explain to him, but I never heard back so whether he holds it against me or not I don’t really know. I don’t let it bother me when someone declines my card any more I just figure it’s their loss of credits and find someone else that will take my credits off my hands. I really like this system and I have been advertising more. I didn’t get to drop yesterday so I’m off to make up for it.