I have read a lot about Entrecard and how great it’s for new blog sites. I tried this new way of getting traffic to my site by dropping widgets on other Entrecard members. I must say it’s somewhat of a burden as all you do is click and close and open and click and close, etc. It seems most people are doing just that. It takes away from the most important part of a blog site, and that is reading the authors content.

I find it funny that you can enter contests to win Entrecard credits also known as EC. You can use EC’s to advertise, but you may have to lose a hand to do so. There are many blog sites that will allow you to advertise your EC, but it may cost you 400+ EC’s. That’s a lot of time collecting credits when you only get 1 EC per click. You’re better off writing interesting content and utilizing another form of paid advertising to draw an audience. The old saying is “you get what you pay for”.

Entrecard is a hit and run concept and it really is not a value add in my opinion. I came across many blog sites that praise the concept. I have reviewed over 100 EC blog sites, and many are not ranked or have a very low reach, and reader base.

Did I mention the site is slow as snot?

Bye, Bye Entrecard!

Many of us and you know who you are said there would never be a black or female President, but think again. Hillary Clinton and Obama Barrack are leading the hearts of Americans, and one of these two presidential candidates could be the next President of the United States. That’s right! I am not sure how worthy these two candidates are, but it’s the best of the crop for now.

Hillary is too hard and there’s no soft side or at least not one that is sincere. Obama has his faults as well, but they’re what they’re. Giuliani steps down and for good reason, he just didn’t have that backbone to lead this fine nation. Yes, he was a great asset to the 9/11 support. As indicated in the news, Giuliani Leaves Race, Endorses McCain. McCain has no chance in the world to even be a close call.

Well, the conclusion is, we will have our first Black or Female President. It can’t be any worse than dumb-ass George Bush.

Welcome to 2009!

If you own and run a web site you want to know how your web site is ranked. Alexa provides this data to you for free. You can download the latest Search Status from here. This is only for Firefox and Mozilla. Search Status allows you to see the performance of any website in the world, including yours when you have your web site opened in Firefox or Mozilla. It is located at the bottom right of your browsers status bar.

It’s important that you know your ranking to see how well your site is doing. Alexa provides you exactly what you need. It’s also a good tool to use when you’re visiting other sites that talk about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If that site isn’t ranked in the top 100K than they’re selling you a pipe dream. I have just started and my site has moved from 12 million to 8 million in matter of weeks. It takes a lot of work to get ranked in the top 100K. There are some great SEO plugins for WordPress that work really well.

How does Alexa Ranking work?

Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1.

Alexa’s traffic rankings are for top level domains only (e.g. domain.com). We do not provide separate rankings for subpages within a domain (e.g. www.domain.com/subpage.html) or subdomains (e.g. subdomain.domain.com) unless we are able to automatically identify them as personal home pages or blogs, like those hosted on Geocities and Tripod. If a site is identified as a personal home page or blog, its traffic ranking will have an asterisk (*) next to it: Personal Page Avg. Traffic Rank: 3,456*. Personal pages are ranked on the same scale as a regular domain, so a personal page ranked 3,456* is the 3,456th most popular page among Alexa users.

One of my favorite free TV to watch on my PC is SopCast. It’s loaded with great channels and even has peer-to-peer technology to broadcast. The quality is great depending on your video card and internet connection. The buffer rate is fast even if there’s many concurrent users connected to a given channel. Fast buffering means smooth viewing with no delay in waiting for a stream to load.

SopCast also has a very nice list of TV channels such as sports, news, comedy, cartoons, movies, etc. Another great distinctive feature to the SopCast player is the VOD (Video on Demand) function. You can now select from a range of different movies and shows and it will play them from the beginning.

The other great feature to sopcast is that you can view pay-per-view broadcasts, such as major boxing events. The only draw back is that it may be in another language, but who cares I can translate the fight by just watching.

System Requirement

To run the SopCast Software, the following requirement is needed:

1. Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Linux. See details.

2. At least 64M System Memory, 128M System Memory is recommended.

3. At least 10MB of Harddisk space.

4. Install Microsoft Media Player 9.0 above RealPlayer or other media player which can play streaming.

Install and Uninstall

SopCast provides two kinds of programs, SopCast and Webplayer (ocx) plugin. SopCast include 3 components, SopPlayer, SopServer and WebPlay. SopPlayer for viewer, SopServer for broadcaster and WebPlayer for web viewer.

Are you excited yet? Visit SopCast and download this awesome client today.

I read a lot of blogs that provide great tips for promoting your blog and or web site. I have just started this site recently and I am following my 3 simple rules to promote not only my blog, but my web site. My success rate in the past with other sites has been fantastic, but it takes a little elbow grease to accomplish the task at hand.

Tip 1: Your site meta tags are important, but not as important as they were 2 years ago. You need to create the 2 most significant meta tags and your title, they’re;

<title>Who are you?</title>

<meta name=”description” content=”here is where you describe your site” />

<meta name=”keywords” content=”blog, bloggers, technology, etc” />

This will help the search engine to index your web page correctly. Yahoo and Google will crawl your web site often, but it may take up to 8 weeks before your index in their directory. You can pay the premium to be index within 24 hours, but it’s not worth it, trust me.

Once you have all your tags completed and your web page is full of content you can now start to submit your web site to many search engines and directories. I recommend one of the best free tools on the internet Web Ceo 7.0. It’s a robust web promotion tool that is free and easy to use. You can buy an upgraded version, but the free product works very nicely.

Web CEO has a lot of features like auto submit. I use this feature to resubmit my site every 6 months. You can get this product by going to www.webceo.com.

Another way to promote your site is post on other sites such as forums that are of interest to you, get your name out these and in turn they will click on your link. You can also promote your blog for free with a little work. Here are a few blog directories that can help get your blog noticed.

http://www.all-blogs.net/submit.php

http://www.blogarama.com/add-a-site/

http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/submit_blog.html

http://blogdigger.com/add.jsp

http://www.blogflux.com/add.php

http://www.sarthak.net/blogz/add.php

Remember nothing comes free, you have to work at it a little each day. You can also download the Alexa ranking tool to see your sites ranking. It’s a great tool to track your progress. You can get it here http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/.

Good luck!