Have you ever wanted to get paid for writing your blog? I mean writing whatever you want, not doing paid reviews for some program you could care less about.

Meet Adgitize!

You get paid (daily credits that convert to cash) for keeping your blog(s) updated.

You get paid for visiting other blogs… not just clicking mindlessly.

You get paid even more when you’re driving traffic to your blogs.

Want to get paid for advertising? Adgitize does that, too! You purchase advertising, and Adgitize pays you double for your blogging efforts, and double for visiting other blogs… how sweet is that?

Will you get rich?

No, but look at it this way. I’m paying $14.00 a month for advertising that sends me about 100 visitors a day. I’ve had 5 new signups to my traffic exchange directly from Adgitize this past month. Oh… and for my efforts, I’m getting paid $22.05.

Adgitize helps me keep my priorities straight. Blog first, visit second, and drive traffic the rest of the day. Get paid for it!

Oh… did I mention they also have an affiliate program? You get paid $5 for each referral who purchases an ad, and another $1.00 for each month they advertise.

So, please, do yourself a favor… Get paid for your efforts!

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I’ve been patient. I’ve waited to see if just perhaps they’d right the ship… but no, now I’m seeing an ad on my site which is neither paid, nor approved by me.

So, Entrecard… farewell.

Please take my 359 EC and put them where the sun won’t shine on them. Oh, and you can also take that coveted membership to your very exclusive VIP forum and put it where the sun won’t shine either.

I can no longer provide any cyber space to a program that can’t keep it’s act together.

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After much back and forth with Matt Oxley, a current Entrecard mod, and Ben Barden, a former Entrecard mod, I may have uncovered the solution to the problem.

This is going to be a long, technical post, which I will put into “newbie” terms so others may benefit from my efforts. In a nutshell, much of the issue lies with the ability to communicate with one another, and the ability to think independently as I was troubleshooting this issue. I did NOT solve this by myself. I also had a roommate follow the very instructions presented, and she could not find the solution either.

So, here we go… finding the solution to the problem.

My original complaint: Entrecard not awarding EC for blog posts for this blog.

The problem: Entrecard software couldn’t find my RSS Feed (something that was pointed out by Matt.)

The troubleshooting process:_

From this post, Matt directed me to change this line of code

<link rel=“alternate” type=“text/xml” title=“RSS .92″

href=“http://choicebusinessblog.com/feed/rss/” />

to this…
<link rel=“alternate” type=“text/xml” title=“RSS .92″
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/LetsDoBusinessWithRealOnlineCompanies” />

Nowhere could I find a place to make that adjustment, so as you can see by my previous post, I felt the first solution was to reinstall the Entrecard widget so at least the spider had a chance to read what I felt were the correct feeds. I had validated every feed I saw with feedvalitator.org.

Fortunately, Ben Barden read this blog and added his assessment, directing me to a help file at Entrecard. Trust me, it wasn’t easy to find, but here it is, reprinted in it’s entirety.

I found this by going to Entrecard>Help>Troubleshooting Guide>Recent posts do not show up in your profile

***** Before I reprint this, do you see any immediate connection to my problem?******

Recent posts do not show up in your profile

Entrecard displays the 5 latest posts in your profile so other members can easily see your latest content. There are a few things that are required for these posts to show up.

You need to look for the feed auto-discovery icon in your browser - it looks like this:

If you do not see your latest posts in your profile, please check the following.

• Does your site have an RSS feed?
• Do you have feed auto-discovery turned on? i.e. if you go to your site, does an orange feed icon appear at the end of the address bar in your browser? Note: this will not work in older browsers, such as Internet Explorer 6.
• If you click the auto-discovery feed icon, does it actually display your feed?
• Is your feed provided as RSS 2.0?
• If you have multiple feeds, is the first feed in the list the one that should be picked up? Is it in RSS 2.0?
• If you use FeedBurner, have you used the “Convert Format Burner” option to force your feed to display as RSS 2.0?
• Is the URL of your feed displayed in full? e.g. yoursite.com/blog/rss rather than /rss
• Are you a new user? If so, your posts will not show up immediately. They will take some time to appear. Please be patient. Ensure that all of the above points are in order.

Here’s an example of what your profile might look like if the recent posts show up.

RSS auto-discovery

Mentioned above is auto-discovery; this is required for Entrecard to pick up your recent posts and keep them updated. Some blogging systems may have an RSS option that you can turn on. If not you may need to add the following code to the header of your site:

<link rel=“alternate” type=“application/rss+xml” title=“Your site title” href=“Your RSS feed URL” />

Replace the two bits of bold text with the title of your site and the URL of your RSS feed.

Here is also a quick reprint of his instructions to me.

1. In your browser, look for the orange feed icon at the end of the address bar.
2. Click the icon. A list of three feeds will pop up.
3. Click the first feed (this is the one that Entrecard picks up). An error occurs.

I actually tried clicking all three of the feeds listed there and they all display the same error. The reason is because in the header of your blog, the URL is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed/LetsDoBusinessWithRealOnlineCompanies

Remove “yourfeed” from the URL and it will work:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/LetsDoBusinessWithRealOnlineCompanies

Here’s what I did…

I began by looking in my Theme Editor at my header.php. I could never clearly identify the issue Matt pointed out.

I clicked on the big orange image in my right sidebar. No help there, as it worked just fine, showing me an RSS feed of my posts.

I found a little orange RSS feed in the footer of my blog, and when I clicked on it, I did get a feed error.

Now nearly simultaneously, Matt sent another comment:

I sen’t an email to you explaining what the problem was…there is a plugin that you may need to get that can often fix this as well…I think its just called the Feedburner plugin for wordpress….I had this same issue when i changed themes because it screwed up the code in my header…keep me updated on whether or not it works please

Since I couldn’t see the same RSS Error, I went looking to see if I had indeed installed the Feedburner plugin.

That is where I found the error that Ben was seeing…

I actually tried clicking all three of the feeds listed there and they all display the same error. The reason is because in the header of your blog, the URL is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed/LetsDoBusinessWithRealOnlineCompanies

Remove “yourfeed” from the URL and it will work:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/LetsDoBusinessWithRealOnlineCompanies

I did indeed have the Feedburner plugin installed and activated. You configure it by going to your Settings>Feedburner

During the setup, I mis-copied the following line for configuration.

Once you have created your FeedBurner feed, enter its address into the field below (http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed):

Only during the process of very carefully re-reading, and separating the posts from Matt and Ben did it finally dawn on me that this instruction was key…

1. In your browser, look for the orange feed icon at the end of the address bar.

Address bar — that’s the place where you type in the URL and the Orange Icon shows up only if you’re not looking an admin area of your site, such as I’m doing right now. I was reading the instructions from inside my admin area.

Once I see the proper credits show up in my Entrecard account, I will re-visit this process and see if there is some way I can wt

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Ok, I got Matt Oxley’s attention with my last post. He and I have exchanged a couple of e-mail communications and I’m agreeing to re-test the Entrecard widget to see if indeed, Entrecard is still awarding credits for blog posts.

Here are the texts of both messages. I am reprinting them because they don’t contain anything that is confidential, and could be extremely beneficial to other Entrecard members.

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 10:00 PM, Shari Thomas  wrote:
Hello Matt,

As you can see, I’ve become incredibly frustrated with Entrecard. I’ve been a long-time member and feel I was treated very unfairly by the current team in charge.

I really believe y’all are on the wrong track, but until more mature leadership appears, you’re basically doomed.

I just checked my feed (which hasn’t changed since I burned it) and it validated just fine.

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/LetsDoBusinessWithRealOnlineCompanies

Please provide a screenshot for the past 60 days. Zip it up and send it to this email address as an attachment.

I wish you the best of success and I enjoy the banter on your blog. I often read it when I am checking out my Adgitize advertisers.

Shari Thomas
Beryl, UT

I found your problem shari…the issue is with the header of your site..it was not some big crazy conspiracy theory…

if you look at the header of your website you will see this line:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" 
href="http://choicebusinessblog.com/feed/rss/" />

it should be changed to

<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92"
 http://feeds2.feedburner.com/LetsDoBusinessWithRealOnlineCompanies" />
after you do that save the file and give it about 3 or
 4 days and you should see your credits come back from
 your blog posts.
this usually happens if you add in some weird plugins or
change themes or something in your wordpress.
let me know how that works.

Matt

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Surprise, surprise! Entrecard is quietly scamming members again. Since sometime in March, Entrecard quietly discontinued a blogging incentive.

Graham Langdon, founder of Entrecard, has long expressed that one of the best ways to drive traffic is to attract traffic, and that should be done with fresh content, visiting blogs and leaving comments in addition to dropping your Entrecard.

That was part of the driving force behind the partnership with SezWho, the now-defunct comment platform.

One of the more successful efforts encouraging Entrecard members to create fresh content was to award 25 EC per blog post up to 3 posts per week, no matter how many blogs you maintain. That’s a maximum of 75 extra credits per week for positive contributions to the blog community.

Now, I can only look back to March 24, but I can safely say that I’ve received zero EC for blog posts since at least that day. There were no announcements in the now-private forum. There were no announcements in the Entrecard blog… heck, nothing’s been updated there since early April.

No, they just quietly stopped awarding the EC hoping no one would notice. Way to go Entrecard.

Granted, Entrecard has a credit inflation issue (to the tune of many millions). They’ve introduced a paid ads system which deflates the value of the drops by up to 50%, since paid ads can run on a widget up to 50% of the time, and the dropper gets no credit for a drop on paid ad.

Look at it this way.

If you generally dropped 50 cards a day (six days a week), were credited up to 75 credits for your posts, you could earn 375 credits on your own efforts. You could count on at least 50% of your drops being reciprocated, so add another 150 credits.

New paid system comes along…

You get credit for 25 cards… but you could get 0, since the software works from the advertiser side, not the dropper side. You no longer earn 75 credits for posting. Your own droppers experience the same problem and they stop reciprocating.

Boom… you’re earning squat!

But Entrecard is taking up space on your blog, showing ads you may or may not approve of, and then treating you like dirt by closing the forum to you unless you’ve sold 400 ads… hellooooo!

So, why don’t I ask Graham what’s happening?

Seems he’s taken a runner. Yep, I’m calling him out. He hasn’t updated his blog since early April. The last time he responded to a comment was April 13. That’s also the last time he bothered to tweet. So… I believe Graham has left the building.

He appears to have left Entrecard in the hands of a 19-year-old kid who has no real people skills, less management skills, and is on a total power trip. Since he’s taken control, Entrecard has gone from a community to concentration camp.

While Andy says he was directed by a higher power… let’s see Graham has left the building and Andy claims to be the “Head Moderator - EC Staff Trainer”, who joined the Entrecard forum on Feb 23. That was about the time Graham was looking for more (new) yes men moderators. The only guy “above” Andy would be “Phirate”, the programmer, and he’s not talking.

So, I’m calling Entrecard dead on arrival, buyer beware, poison, you name it. The card has gone toxic. Members are leaving faster than they’re joining. Don’t believe the crap Andy is feeding you.

The Alexa stats spiked on April 19, the day Shoemoney wrote his stinking piece of excrement review and plug. Tell me… do you see the Entrecard widget on his blog? Ever since that day, the traffic is doing a slow drop. Watch for it to continue to drop, right off the radar.

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Shoemoney and Graham Langdon jumped in bed together to do a JV. Shoemoney wrote an exaggerated review for big bucks and Graham promptly spammed the Entrecard list.

Only one teensy-weensy problem… the list included a lot of blogs already deleted for various reasons.

Case in point.

from entrecard by app1.entrecard.com with local (Exim 4.67)…  Fri, 10 Apr 2009
Your account ‘Traffic-Exchange-Business.com Blog’
on entrecard.com has been accepted!. Welcome to our community.

On Satuday April 11, this blog was deleted, reinstated and deleted again, within a few hours. Additionally, Shari’s Gone Country!, Ask Me Why… Work From Home, Successful Food Service, Ask Shari About PGA Tour Fantasy Golf, and Escalante Desert Valley News each recieved warnings for “spam sent to Entrecard members” and at least 15000 EC were removed from the accounts as penalty.

I chose at that time to first disable the ads, since I couldn’t seem to stop the “paid ads”, and if I couldn’t communicate with my EC Advertisers, there was no point to purchasing advertising from me.

Later, I removed the widgets from each of those blogs. On April 15 I was given 72 hours to put the widget up, or the blogs would be deleted. I chose to allow the deletion.

The blogs were each deleted on April 18.

Imagine my surprise when the following piece of spam appeared in EACH of the deleted blog e-mail accounts.

My Thunderbird client even sent up a Scam Warning.

Amazing Tools To Get More Traffic To Your Site

This message was sent from Entrecard Team to xxxxx@xxxx4success.com. It was sent from: Entrecard.com Inc, 222 Columbia St # 301, Santa Cruz, CA 95060. You can modify/update your subscription via the link below.

To be removed click here

This email landed in accounts which were to be used for official Entrecard communication. The Entrecard accounts had been deleted three days previous to this email being sent. No, I am not required to “opt out” from a not to be used account.

That is spam. The only problem is the children at Entrecard wouldn’t know spam if they had a mouth full of it.

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A couple days ago, Shoemoney, a supposedly highly-read and admired blogger stooped to a new low by writing a exaggerated review about Entrecard and the new Paid Ads Platform.

Okay so Entrecard just made a huge move that is sure to start bringing them a boat load of money. They just launched a self-service ad network for the blogosphere, using their existing base of tens of thousands of blog publishers as participants. I gotta say, it’s pretty bad ass.

Shoe… ya’ should’a checked your facts.

Huge move? Yeah, if you count the outburst from long-time members when they discovered they were losing control of the advertising on their blogs, and that their eccles (Entrecard Credits) would now be worth about half of what they were, since paid ads would rotate up to 50% of the time on the Entrecard widgets.

Self-service ads? More like self-serving ads since Graham gets the money and he may or may not pay it back out in some convoluted fashion. Sure he says there’s a cashout value of $1 per 1000 if you give him your private info (including SSN) up front. Oh, and if you want to purchase credits, he charges $6 per 1000. Nice exchange!

Existing base of tens of thousands blog publishers? Where’d ya’ get that number? Even if you believe the figures by counting the number of blogs in the categories, that doesn’t make “tens of thousands”. Add to that, most of us have/had multiple blogs. The real number may never be known since Graham appears to have left the building.

Bad ass? Yeppers, this one you got right. Graham is a bad ass. He’s been known to use a fake account to counter critics. He’s treated his mods like dirt. He’s broken promise after promise, and now, it appears he is close to broke. In fact, he’s not updated the official Entrecard blog since April 11. Think maybe he’s left the building, too?

I just took the time to check out one Category - Home and Garden. While Graham and Entrecard claim there are 282 blogs listed, only 161 actually have a widget and accept any kind of ads, let alone the paid ads.  I’d be willing to bet there may be fives of thousands… not tens of thousands.

In short, Shoemoney… you blew it on this review. I do hope the money you got was worth it.

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Entrecard has taken the drastic step of taking their forum completely private. Here’s the release about the move.

We now have a new forum structure.

You must apply to join the Approved Users usergroup via your User CP

http://forums.entrecard.com/profile….editusergroups

Include in the request the link to your dashboard.

The rules for the new structure will be:
You must be an entrecard member.
You must have purchased 400 ads
The only all user area will be community support. Anything that is not a valid community support thread will be deleted.
From here forward there will be no bashing of any kind.

Items will be added as needed.
If any thread or post is deemed unacceptable it will be deleted. The second instance will result in a ban.

Thank you,
Andy

They completely wiped every thread from the current forum, eliminating all dissent.

Now, let me explain why this spells the end for Entrecard.

• On the Internet, you can cover up but never eliminate dissent. Potential new members (advertisers) do their due dilligence and they will find the information.
• Members who are unhappy and have no recourse for discussion leave with a very bad taste and spread the bad news faster than a common cold.
• Yes, each forum is “private property”. However when you squelch the ability to question decisions, you invite outside criticism that may or may not be warranted.

I’ve seen a number of programs where the owner made some bone-headed decision, got a ton of dissent, panicked and then squelched the dissent, only to lose the membership, income and see the program close.

To all potential new members of Entrecard…

Be aware you will be asked for your private information, including your SSN, phone number, etc, if you choose to participate in the “credit cashout program”. This doesn’t mean you’ll be accepted. They get your information whether or not you get accepted.

The good news is that they appear to be using a secure server at this point.

Should you choose to join this program, be aware that your own efforts at “dropping” are now worth up to 50% less thanks to the paid advertising placed on your blogs by Entrecard.

Sure, you can choose not to show paid ads (if the “bugs” in their program have been fixed), however you will be penalized for doing so, potentially by not being able to cash out your credits.

So, what was once a vibrant blogger’s community is now nothing more than a program that forces you to “pay to play”. You pay by giving up cyber-estate on your blog for paid advertising. You get nothing in return, unless you’re allowed to cash out your credits at a measly $1.00 per 1000 credits.

Oh, and about that dropping… you don’t earn any credits for dropping on a paid ad.

Here’s how you can tell if the ad is from a paid advertiser… look in the address bar at the bottom of your browser as you hover your mouse over the Entrecard ad. If you see “type=paid”, then don’t bother to click, as it won’t get you anything.

Sure you may or may not land on another Entrecard member blog, but you’ve got a 50/50 chance of it going someplace else… and that is a waste of your time.

Bottom line, another immature decision by the children running Entrecard.

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Graham Langdon, owner of Entrecard, a blog traffic driving community has been caught using a fake profile (aka Sock Puppet) and posting entries attempting to defend his ridiculous positions.

At issue is the release of statistical data showing how many members, how many blogs, and exactly how much traffic is truly delivered.

Now that Entrecard is selling ad space on the the members’ blogs, this information is critical to advertisers.

With Graham stooping to the new low, it will be surprising if anyone sticks around.

The first to call him on it was “Turnipofpower”, who promptly posted the information on his blog. He traced both IP addresses, and determined the imposter (Sock Puppet) never had a blog, never dropped for any credits, etc.

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So, you’ve got Entrecredits to cash out?

If you’re smart, you’ll forego the option as Entrecard is currently demanding you give them your name, address, phone number, SSN (social security number) or EIN (employer information number) and your Paypal account all via an unsecured web form.

Now, I’m sure Phirate is smarter than that, but Graham, being the child that hs is, has no regard for the safety of his members’ private information.

Members have been asking in the forum to have the form placed on a secure server to no avail.

Here’s what’s worse…

Even if you fill out the information, there is no guarantee you’ll get paid anytime soon.

Yes, the IRS does require this information. However, there are ways around this, especially since the chances of anyone actually earning the $600 per year required for taxes.

To earn $600, you’ll be doing it at $1 per 1000 EC or 600,000 EC. Yeah right!

One option many online companies use is to accept your application without such private information if they don’t have a secure server. They then send you an e-mail with a link to the W-9 form and instructions to fax the info or scan, upload and e-mail (only slightly more secure).

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