Entrecard Advertising Statistics

After reading Sharkbyte's recent post about traffic from Entrecard, I wondered whether or not my Entrecard advertising is still effective. To investigate further I've taken a closer look at my Entrecard advertising for the last 10 days.

Entrecard is a system in which you earn credits (ec) by visiting other blogs in the network. The credits can be used to buy ads on other members' sites. Advertising prices range from 2-2048ec depending how popular the blog is.

Each day I try to buy 15 cheap ads (2-8ec), 10 medium price ads (16-64ec) and 2 more expensive ads (128ec+). Here's a summary showing the number of click returned by ads at each price point:

Ad Cost	0 clicks	1 clicks	2 clicks	3 clicks	4+ clicks
2	51	9	1
4	33	10	5	1	3
8	28	9	3	2	2
16	18	8	5	1	3
32	1	7	1	4	19
64			2	2	11
128			1	1	12
256					4
384					3
512					5

For example of the 61 ads I bought at 2ec, 51 received 0 clicks. To work out if one particular price gives better value I calculated the CPC for each:

Ad Cost	No of Ads	Total Clicks	CPC
2	61	11	11.1
4	52	36	5.8
8	44	34	10.4
16	35	46	12.2
32	32	182	5.6
64	15	148	6.5
128	14	203	8.8
256	4	93	11.0
384	3	98	11.8
512	5	204	12.5

Ads at 2ec normally are normally clicked once for every 11.1ec spent. Unless there's a statistical anomaly, ads at 4ec, 32ec and 64ec seem to represent good value.

To determine whether or not this is true I'm changing how I advertise. From now on I plan to only buy ads on blogs priced 4, 32 and 64ec. What's your Entrecard advertising strategy?

Blogger SEO: Optimizing Title Tags for Blogger

There's plenty of SEO advice available for Blogger. There's some great advice to be found but unfortunately there's also information that's out of date, ineffective and even harmful.

I noticed recently a couple of friends are following some bad advice and this prompted me to apply my previous SEO experience to Blogger and share a few tips.

The page title is an important factor in ranking well in the search results. In fact Blogger's default titles aren't too bad. Here are examples from English Wilderness:

Homepage: English Wilderness
Post: English Wilderness: Red-Tailed Bumble Bee
Label: English Wilderness: Insect
Archive: English Wilderness: October 2009

However these can be improved. On the individual post page the name of the post should come before the blog name. On the label page the label name should come before the name of the blog. Finally on the homepage the blog's subheading could be included in the title.

Here's what I have in mind:

Homepage: Photos from the English Wilderness | Exploring the Wild Places
Post: Red-Tailed Bumble Bee | English Wilderness
Label: Insect Photo Gallery | English Wilderness
Archive: English Wilderness Photo Archive | October 2009

And here's how it's done.

In Blogger go to the Layout page and select Edit HTML. Make a backup of your template by hitting Download Full Template.

Next look down the template code for the <title> tag. It should look similar to the following:

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

Remove everything from <title> to </title> inclusive and replace with the following, editing the sections highlighted in green as necessary:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<title>Photos from the English Wilderness | Exploring the Wild Places</title>
<b:else/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;archive&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.title/> Photo Archive | <data:blog.pageName/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> Photo Gallery | <data:blog.title/></title>
</b:if></b:if></b:if>

Finally Save Template and check the title tags for your homepage, posts, label pages and archive have changed as desired.

Photo Failures: Urban Fox

Ratty at The Everyday Adventurer recently discussed something we all suffer from, photographic failures. There are two problems which ruin my pictures on a regular basis, blurry pictures and missing the moment.

I recently published some example of blurry photos taken from my kite. Normally I take about a dozen shots hoping one will turn out okay, but occasionally they're all blurry. :-(

Missing the moment is the most annoying. By the time I take the shot the moment has passed. If I'd been just a few seconds faster with the camera I would've caught this urban fox staring right at me. Instead he's walking away :-(

When was the last time you missed the moment with your camera?