Sorry about the title. Don’t really have any fantasy right now. Well. I have been away from my computer since friday morning. The weekend have been used to meet up with the family, and celebrate my fathers birthday. Woho. It has been a pain without the computer, but I did have my “eee” with me. (Talk about that one in a later post).

The big comment project

If you are a fan of reading blogs and commenting on them, you have probably noticed a guy called “Danny Cooper”. He is everywhere, and if you have a decent blog in this niche chances are big that hes on your blog as well. Nothing wrong with that though. Thing is, Danny have a project going, called “October Case Study: Blog Commenting“.

Danny sent me an mail asking for a plug, so here you go. To sum up the plan Danny got he got a list of about 60 blogs which he are following each day. Each time someone makes a post he will leave a comment. He claims that he is not going to spam, but tell his honest opinion on the subject posted. This case study is going to all October. When October is over, he will make a report, where he disclose traffic, referrals, back links etc.

I think it’s a good approach to increase traffic/subscribers, and it will be fun to see the result. Check out Dannys blog here:

http://linkersblog.com

What about VikingBlogger?

Hopefully you have noticed that my posting frequents has increased by a lot lately. And to my joy a lot of you old guys still are hanging around, and are starting to make comments again. There is also a couple new faces. I would love to know more about my readers. So if you want to tell me and rest of the crowd more about yourself and your site(s) your welcome to do so below in a comment.

The top commentators

Once in a while I like to give something back to my commentators. One of the way I do that is by giving them a link. Well, it’s time to give the top 5 some love again. Here is the guys that have made the most comments on VikingBlogger so far in October.

Top Commentators

• Danny Cooper
• Chetan
• Simon from Otooo
• Clog Money
• Eric Tan

Gravatar added

I have added gravatars to the comments. So now you can easly see who have made the comment. This is also a good opportunity to brand yourself. If you haven’t made yourself a gravatar yet, you should do so now. Just go to Gravatar.com and sign up for an free account.

I guess thats got to be the longest headline ever. Right? Anyway, the issue is simple really. I want the get the activity up on the blog. I think that one way to do that is to make VikingBlogger a do-follow blog. Since I can’t give any traffic back (the blog don’t have any:P) I guess a valid backlink would be worth it.

When you comment on a post, your name will link back to your site. This is now a no-follow link, so that only gains you some clicks. (if you are really lucky) and if you link to one of the posts here you will get listed as a trackback. Those links are also no-follow. What I’m thinking of is to make those links do-follow.

So, my question is; Would You Leave a Comment And Link To VikingBlogger If You Got A Do-Follow Link?

I won a t-shirt over at Shoemoney a couple days ago, and everyone that wins a t-shirt (1 each day) gets an entry into the monthly draw of a grand price. This month Shoemoney are going to give away two MacBooks. One of them being an Air.

So, I have to fight against 28 other people, giving me a almost 3.5% chance to win. Shoemoney didn’t say if one winner takes both laptops, or if there will be two winners, but I guess there will be two, and that gives me a little better percent, but it’s still a long shot. But, I wouldn’t mind a new laptop. Which one would you have picked, the MacBook Air or the White Macbook?

Here is the other contestants that might ruin my chance to get a new (and first apple product) laptop:

Michael Martine – Remarkablogger
ErinK
Amanda (DrifterMama)
Chris
Joe Tech
SEO next
Zak Show
Custom T-Shirts
CoolProducts
Golf Games
Stephanie
Dave
Bryn Youngblut
atlanta wedding photographer
Danilo
HSD
mrkbsm
Dick
Craig L
Bradley
BarryO
SMM Guru
Jay Tillery
cheap used cars
Clog Money
Steve Cospolich
Ganesh
Billy

Foto: Shoemoney.com

Edit 2. October 2008: I think I overlooked a thing. The grand price aren’t each month. It’s each 2 month. So still a month to the drawing. My bad.

Guess what, Entrecard.com is not for sale anymore. Yesterday Graham wrote a post in the Entrecard blog about the decision. Graham starts his psot with the following:

The 48 hours that transpired since listing my site on Sitepoint have been incredible. In fact, no less than 20 people have reached out to me and gave me a phone call. Over the past two days, I’ve talked to business leaders, CEOs, advertising execs, Tony the CEO of BlogCatalog, VCs, biz dev people, a gaming company in Israel, companies in the UK, and more. I’ve been on the phone so long I’m probably developing a tumor.

It looks like the whole sale thing got a little viral. The auction did not get any bids, but Graham received some bids behind the scenes, but I guess no one was high enough to make him sell it off.

It looks like Graham now is determen to make Entrecard work. I think it’s the right move, and hopefully he can take Entrecard back on it’s feet again.

Just checked my email, and guess who I got an email from. Shoemoney. Or, well, technically it was from Susan, but I guess she is working for him.

Dear VikingBlogger,

Congratulations! You are the randomly selected winner for your comments written on a shoemoney blog post on 2008-09-26. You have won a ShoeMoney t-Shirt and a chance at this months grand prize!

Each day Shoemoney draws one comment left on his blog, and sends the commentator a free t-shirt. They ship it for free anywhere in the world, so I guess a sweet shirt is heading my way in Norway. (Hey, that rimes..)

Link In The Header

The other cool thing about winning this draw is that Shoemoney places the last 4 winners in the header of his blog. The name is linking back to the winners blogs. So for 4 more days I got a free link on a premium location on Shoemoney.com. Cool. I wounder if it brings any clicks…

Have you won anything lately?

Google are updating the Page Rank again, and after over 9 months without a PR this blog got itself a rank. And it’s actually a decent one as well. Vikingblogger.com is now considered a Page Rank 3 website. Hehe.

Looks like Shoemoney still got his PR6 and Chow is down from PR4 to PR3. Hey, that means that Google thinks that my blog is worth the same as John Chow’s. Hmm…) Tyler Cruz is also down, from PR3 to PR2.

If you wonder, I got the Page Rank numbers from my Google Toolbar. If you don’t got the toolbar installed, you can check your page rank here: http://digpagerank.com

What PR did your site(s) get?

Edit: Alright, it might happend that I pushed piblush alitle fast on this one. When getting out of bed now, I see that the blog is back to PR0. I guess we have to give it a couple days before we can see what big G set the PR to.

So, on my daily round to see if there is some cools sites for sale over at Sitepoint I found a familiar name, Entrecard.com.

It appears that the owner Graham Langdon are selling his baby. The starting bid is $100.000 and he says in a comment that he got a reserve that is just under a million dollar.

If you have been blogging the last year, you got to have heard about Entrecard. But if you haven’t it’s basically an simple banner exchange for blogs. You display 125×125 banners on your site, and you get your banner on other sites.

The Lift Of

The service got really popular after a couple of the big shots in the industry put them on their blogs. This included Shoemoney, John Chow and Problogger. Hey, even I put them on my site for a while. But, after some time a lot of bloggers found out the most of the traffic was crap, and took the widget of their site. Non of the big bloggers got the widget on their site anymore, and neither do I.

Alexa Tells The Truth?

If you are a fan of Alexa you might notice that the stats are going down for Entrecard. At least for the site itself.

In my world, this chart actually tells me what I have been thinking, that Entrecard flopped. The funny thing is though, when reading the auction description it looks like Entrecard actually did the opposite thing. Here is what Graham start the description with:

OUR AD NETWORK DELIVERS:

80 MILLION IMPRESSIONS PER MONTH
3 MILLION CLICKS PER MONTH
GROWING AT 16% MONTH-OVER-MONTH without any marketing

Thats pretty impressive stats, and doesn’t fit really well into my “flop” theory.

I launched Entrecard ad network 11 months ago, and in that time is has spread to 20,000 blogs delivering 80 million impressions per month. We’re growing fast, and in the next year alone we’re on track to sign up between 40,000 to 80,000 more blogs

Ok, so Entrecard got 20.000 blogs in their network now, and are calculating with up to 80.000 blogs within 2009. Graham says that around 100 new blogs sign up each day, which are 3000 each month and 36.000 each year. Pretty impressive. But how can the network grow and grow, but fewer and fewer big blogs are getting on board. Hey, most of them are actually jumping over board.

If we get back to the falling Alexa stats he explains the falling in traffic on the site with the launch of the Entrecard toolbar. He says that the toolbar is used by 7.000 bloggers, and that they don’t need to go on the site, because they can do everything with the toolbar. I guess thats make sense. But It’s still strange that the traffic is falling that dramatically. But then again I just got alexa stats, I don’t got the server stats, so it might not be that accurate.

The Reason

The reason of why he is selling of Entrecard is actually quite good, I’ll just copy/paste what he wrote:

I am selling because I have come to a stalemate. Entrecard is growing fast, but I do not have the resources to put behind it. I recently met extensively with Venture Capitalists who were going to make a 700k seed investment and a 2-5m follow on Series A investment in 6 months. The deal fell through in the 11th hour, right before the terms sheet, because they lost faith in my ability to execute the plan after a series of tests in which I did not know I was being tested. The valuation we were discussing was 8 million. We were going to open a headquarters, hire 10 people, and go straight to the top. Then it fell apart, and after getting my hopes up, I just haven’t been able to get back on my feet. I’m a wreck and feeling like a failure to come so close only to drop it due to my idiocy.

Strange reason, but it might be legit. I don’t know Graham in personal, so I can’t be the judge.

12x Montly Revenue Right?

The ongoing price for sites these days are around 12 times monthly revenue. I know Entrecard don’t fit well into this, but I find it strange that Graham haven’t monetized the site better then making around $2.000 per month. Hes bragging about ideas that easily could shoot the earnings up to $30.000 per month. The question I got in my head is; Why haven’t Graham implemented this ideas himself?

Final Words

I think Graham are trying to sell a sinking ship. Thats my personal opinion. Next year Entrecard will be a service that are almost dead. I have quoted Graham some times in this post, and I guess we have room for one last quote:

Whoever buys this site, if you develop it and hold onto it for a year or two, will sell it for 20 million + easily.

Right, that brings me back to the monthly income issue. Why don’t you just keep the site yourself for a year or two and cash in 20+ million dollars “easy”. :0/

Do you still have the Entrecard widget on your blog?

It’s been 10 years since Google saw the light. I’m not going to write a big post about this, but go and checkmout the cool timeline that they have created.

To start with, Larry and Sergey (the founders) was calling their search engine BackRub, but they decided it needed a new name. 15. september 1998 they registered the domain Google.com.

Larry and Sergey decide that the BackRub search engine needs a new name. After some brainstorming, they go with Google – a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.

If we take a look at the Google homepage back in 1998 it looks kinda similar to todays version. heh.

In my daily internet use, I do use a lot of Google products. What product from Google exept the search and gmail do you use, and like the most?

So, If you have been with me on this blog since the begining you all now it all started so well, but then in February/March it went downhill. I did not have enough time to write, and with less and less updates, the amount of visitors went down. But, I never gave up on the blog, and I haven’t yet either.

In todays post I thought I should share some love to the few people actually commented on my blog this month.

Top commentators

• Chetan (3)
• Hugo Santos (1)
• Kathy Mead (1)
• purposeinc (1)

Check out their blogs.

Where are we now

So, you might wonder where this blog is now. Well, after a quick look in analytics I can report that It has been getting a steady 600-700 visits per month. It’s nothing to brag about, I know, but then again, I haven’t done anything to promote the blog, except writing a post or two each month.

RSS are going great

There are actually 83 people subscribed to the RSS feed, still with no updates. This tells me that there are actually someone out there that would like to read what i write. This is a big motivator, and I would love to break the 100 mark before Christmas. Help me achieve that, and subscribe to the blog!

Some thoughts

July, this summer I wrote a post telling you that VikingBlogger where going to do a comeback, as you might have noticed this haven’t happened, yet. I still want to grow this blog into something big, but it’s really hard to use much time on something that doesn’t give any cash in the pocket.

Anyway, who are still reading this blog? Leave a comment, and tell me/the world what you are up to these days.

Wordpress is now out with an new update which is 2.6.2. It’s primarily a security update, and If you allow open registration on your blog, you should upgrade.  With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to make a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password.

Download Wordpress 2.6.2

Source: Wordpress Blog