I found this list via Yahoo’s web services today, and thought it was interesting. It’s a valuable peek at the most frequently used tags for web pages. If you’re marketing a site via social media, or looking for a niche broad enough to provide blogging fodder for a few years, it is a neat way to see what the most frequently bookmarked ‘topics’ are.

1. video
2. videos
3. movies
4. photos
5. movie
6. hot
7. blogger
8. young
9. music
10. reference
11. blog
12. travel
13. fun
14. free
15. business
16. software
17. technology
18. design
19. tv
20. sports
21. howto
22. tools
23. blogs
24. money
25. humor
26. science
27. search
28. imported
29. google
30. art
31. funny
32. home
33. tech
34. linux
35. mobile
36. computer
37. photography
38. apple
39. mp3
40. programming
41. cool
42. photo
43. dvd
44. politics
45. food
46. finance
47. education
48. rss
49. vacation
50. information

Interesting to note that four out of the first five are video related. This could possibly mean that users are more likely to tag interesting videos than interesting text content online.

I’m not the biggest Entrecard user on the Net, so it took me until early this morning to notice the ad price inflation that has taken place on the service.

The change was intended to make EC more of a marketplace rather than a popularity contest, but the result, at least in the short term, was to devalue the Entrecard credit as a ‘currency.’

Right now, there are very, very few sites that it would be smart, from an economics point of view, to advertise on with EC credits because they are simply a BAD DEAL.

I’m not talking hypothetically, here.

Take ProBlog Reviews, for example. A site with four months of archives and a PR0, is currently at top of the Make Money Online price list at 262144 EC credits per day.

Given the average market price of credits on Ebay for the past month, which is approximately .0045 per credit or $4.50 per thousand credits, advertising on this blog would cost $1,179 per day in real cash value.

Problogger.com’s ad price is currently listed at 131,072 EC credits per day, which in real value terms is about $590 per day or more than $17,500 per month. I think you can get a better deal on his regular ad space through B5 Media.

John Chow’s blog will cost you a much lesser amount… 8192 EC credits per day. Still, that’s a monthly ‘real cash’ rate that’s double his ‘get reviewed by’ price. You’d be better off buying direct.

My estimate is that the Ebay price for EC credits is currently way too high. The ‘real’ price - based on advertising value - under the current credit system is .00125 per credit, or $1.25 per thousand.

So, what to do.

First, don’t buy EC credits from Ebay until the price stabilizes under the new system. Second, don’t advertise on any sites over 128 credits until prices stabilize. Till then hoard your credits or exchange with other EC users for things of real value like reviews or permanent links.. Finally, keep reciprocating and dropping, since this is still, and will remain, a very valuable way to grow traffic to your blog.

ONE FINAL THOUGHT

I recall reading somewhere that EC will begin selling credits for $10 per 1000 EC credits. Under the current credit advertising system, I don’t think this will work for them.

Assuming the biggest and best blogs out there charge $10,000 per month for an ad –and that’s way more than I’d be willing to pay, but just go with me here — then the ‘real money’ daily price for an EC widget ad shouldn’t be more than $333. If the folks running EC want the value of 1000 credits to be ~$10, then ad prices for any blog should max out at about 33,333 EC rather than the hundreds of thousands of EC they are at right now.

Does that make sense, or is my math off?

All other thoughts, opinions, or disagreements are welcome in the comments.

5000 Entrecard credits US $9.00 (0 Bid) End Date: Sunday May-18-2008 9:44:57 PDT Bid now | Buy it now | Add to watch list

2000 Entrecard credits(cheapest ever!! start at 1cent!) US $0.56 (2 Bids) End Date: Sunday May-18-2008 21:37:41 PDT Bid now | Add to watch list

2,000 Entrecard credits US $5.99 (0 Bid) End Date: Tuesday May-20-2008 9:36:13 PDT Bid now | Add to watch list

5,000 Entrecard Credits For Sale US $5.50 (1 Bid) End Date: Tuesday May-20-2008 22:31:19 PDT Bid now | Add to watch list

2000 Entrecard Credits US $4.75 (2 Bids) End Date: Wednesday May-21-2008 12:24:51 PDT Bid now | Add to watch list

Add Ebay to YOUR blog

I haven’t done anything in the field of Internet marketing since November 2006. My existing sites are still rolling, and proving the value of promoting physical and evergreen products with real, non-spammy sites, my income from those sites hasn’t diminished more than one or two percent since that date.

But now, faced with starting a new project, I feel rusty.

So, I thought I’d bone up on a bit of reading at the Warrior Forum (It seemed more helpful and interesting to me before. Not so much now. Is it just me?), pull out some old software to see if it still works, and find an interesting marketing list or two to join for ideas.

Thanks to a pointer from Belle, I downloaded Jeremy Palmer’s free High Performance Affiliate Marketing ebook, and printed it off to get me back in the ‘zone’.

Any other ideas on lists to join, software to buy, or information to scour? I’m not looking for overload, but I did notice that the keyword software and article submission software I was using two years ago no longer works, and I’m a lot behind in the web 2.0 marketing world….

One of the hottest sites to come out of the Web 2.0 phenomenon is Squidoo. If you are not building sites to Squidoo, you are missing one of the quickest and easiest ways to build free traffic for your website or blog.

Squidoo is a cross between a blog, a mini site, and a My Space page. Squidoo calls the sites “lenses” and the people who produce the sites are called “lensmasters.”

Squidoo lenses are very easy to make, even if you have not ever built a website or blog before. You can have a lens up and running in as little as 15 minutes.

Squidoo lenses are made up of “modules”. Squidoo has dozens of modules to choose from. There are modules for making lists. There are modules for You Tube videos. There are modules for Amazon and Ebay auctions. With a little knowledge of the module system, you can have your lens built in no time.

Squidoo also offers you a chance to make money from your lens. Squidoo makes its money from affiliate advertising with Google AdSense, Amazon, Ebay and several other sites. They keep track of the earnings of each module and split the profits with you 50-50. You can also donate your profits of your module to charity if you wish.

Squidoo is very lenient about allowing you to use third party advertising on your lens. You can promote your own website if you wish or promote your favorite affiliate product. Savvy network marketers often use Squidoo lenses to promote their products and recruit new reps.

Squidoo lenses often rank very high on Google, so it’s a great chance to build some backlinks to your primary site, or promote a variety of Clickbank links on a given topic.

Check out Tiffany Dow’s “Social Networking on Squidoo” for the best information on using Squidoo to capture leads and make sales in any niche with Squidoo.

Click here!

It seems that people really, really want incoming links. I don’t know how many people reading this actually will follow through and DO the things that will lead to tons of incoming links, but I’ll throw some more ideas out there anyway, for those who DO have the motivation.

 1) Articles. Yep, articles with links back to your site. They actually work to some degree, as long as 1) they are well written and specific, 2) they are in a niche that is at least moderately well covered by other marketers building their sites.

2) Articles on steroids… would be to not just distribute articles, but to create a few variations of a full Adsense-optimized website with multiple links to you.  

3) Templates… This works too. Create Wordpress templates, blogger templates, vbulletin templates, myspace templates, neopets templates… whatever floats your boat, and give them away as long as a link to your website is maintained.  (In some cases, you can even sell the template and require the link. I just paid $160 for a vbulletin template. The terms state that the link back must stay unless I pay another $120 to remove it.)

 4) Template Adaptations– A thought for those with some HTML knowledge but no design ability – adapt OSWD.org templates for your favorite tool, whether it be Instant Niche Site Builder or XSite Pro.

5) Organize the unorganized : If you don’t know how to do either 3 or 4, why not find a tool where templates are scattered hither and thither and compile a directory of all the best templates. A well organized template directory site is easy link bait.

6) RSS. I don’t mean putting feeds on your site, I mean offering a really solid daily article, recipe, craft, themed photo, or other valuable tidbit via RSS that other people can host on their site. Include your link in every article, and you’ve got a one-way link, and the webmasters using your feed get free evolving content they can monetize.

7) Syndicate a database of …. anything. If your site is focusing on fishing rods, why not create a widget that people can plug in to their websites that offers a search of fishing rod repair shops by location? You can include a “widget by yoursite.com” link to get the return from the main widget and any results pages too. You’re offering solid, useful content to webmasters that use the widget, and in return you’ll get plenty of front page high profile links to your site. And depending on the complexity of your content, I’d bet you could have something built for under $100 on RentACoder. And if your widget gets a lot of use, you could charge repair shops for inclusion in the database.

Reciprocal linking. It’s not dead, it just needs to be more discriminate. Try SiteSell’s Value Exchange for a way to exchange links that doesn’t turn your links pages into a liability instead of an asset.

9) Buy links… but not necessarily through text link brokers. Why not find a blogger with a closely related subject and offer them cash to link your site to every instance of “keyword” on their website.  You could even offer a Wordpress plugin that does the work for them automatically — just follow along with this tutorial and change ‘fu’ and ‘bar’ to ‘keyword’ and  linked keyword and you’re home free.

10) Social Bookmarks - ok, I know this is probably self-serving, but it does bring links and traffic, so just check it out :)  

My son wants me to color with him now, so that’s where I’ll leave off. Use your imagination to come up with variations. If you offer webmasters something that’s valuable to them, you can get links back. Not just links on hidden link directories and invisible pages, but solid, high profile links.

But you have to take the time or money to create, invent, or develop something worth the link first.