If you are in need of publicity and/or buzz for your service or company, Izea is definitely your one stop shop. You can get everything you need from the various social media advertising they offer. They have products sampling, blog posts, and blog sponsorships just to name a few of the offers you can do.  I have been on both sides of the campaigns that can be run;  I have run some of my own opportunites for bloggers, and I am a blogger myself.  The Izea staff is great — if you have any question, they are great to help you get exactly what you want.  Izea now has two marketplaces you can choose from — PPP and Social Spark.  PPP allows you to pick segmentation and any blogger who meets your criteria can choose your opportunity.  Social Spark is more of social networking site.  You are able to set up blogrolls and street teams and choose which bloggers can take you opportunity.  There also is the marketplace like at PPP that allows anyone to take your opportunity.  You can set it up that after your opportunity is full that people can request a slot.  They will tell you why they should blog about you.  It is great way for you to find bloggers that missed out on your opportunity but still are a good fit for you.  They also have dynamic pricing where instead of spending all your money in one day, you can choose a daily spend.  These are just a few of the advantages of working with Izea.  I highly recommend trying them out if you want to advertise!

I know when I first started blogging on my own domain I wish that there were some web hosting tutorials out there. When you are new to web hosting, there is just so much confusing information out there that you have no idea about. I lucked out and picked a good hosting company, but I know several people who didn’t. They still are searching for a good service to use. When you find sites with all the questions you have answered, you know you hit a jackpot. I have several people who I know are looking for cheap hosting and have a ton of questions. I will definitely be sending them over to Web Hosting Articles & Tutorials.

Elizabeth over at Table4Five is giving this really cute little badge out to all her readers. She doesn’t want to forget anybody, so she put this up for anyone who wants it since all her readers rock! I think this is such a cute idea.  Make sure if you want one of these for your blog, you head over there.

Hmm, this is making me hungry.  LOL

PayU2Blog and Jewel Elegance are working together to put on a treasure hunt for the bloggers that work for them. They are going to be giving away things like diamond jewelry to lucky winners! This sounds like super fun and this weeks winner will get an ankle bracelet worth $240! If you are a PayU2Blog blogger, make sure you check your inbox for this great contest!

Have you heard of Entrecard before? If you are a blogger, its one of those sites that makes you excited like when you were in high school and found the best acne treatment ever. Seriously, Entrecard drives a fair amount of traffic to your site. However, they recently have gone through some changes that all the users don’t agree with. I won’t get into that since everything can change again in a day or two.

Instead, this post is about Owen and how awesome he is. Owen has written a plugin called EntreDroppers for us WP users. You can see it working in my sidebar (Its called Latest EntreDroppers). All you have to do is input your RSS feed from your Entrecard inbox, and that’s it!  You can tweak it to look like you want — descriptions after blogs, number of blogs showing, etc.  I have mine to show the last ten blogs to drop on me.

Give a shout out to Owen and let him know he rocks and download his plugin!

I know I have talked about how much I love Entrecard.  They are a great way to drive traffic to your blog and have a great community.  Today, some cool changes took place and some not so cool changes too.

First, the cool changes.  Now, you can see how many times a person has dropped their Entrecard on you.  It also lists your last 5 posts that you have done on your blog.  Both are very cool changes that I think are great.

Now, onto the not so good changes.  The change that I absolutely hate that happened today (without any warning) is that you can only drop 600 cards per ip.  Now, if you have one blog this is no big deal.  However, if you have more than 2 blogs in the system (I have 3), this royally screws you.  How?  Normally, you can drop 300 cards per account you have.  Since I have 3 accounts, I was dropping up to 900 cards a day.  Yes, I actually do read the majority of those blogs I was dropping my cards on (not everybody updates daily or weekly).  It would take me several hours a day to do.  However, the traffic that I received from that made it well worth me doing.  By looking at my entrecard stats, I can definitely see the difference in my traffic depending on the number of cards I dropped.  More cards = more traffic.

Now, this not only effects me.  This effects every person who has more than 2 blogs in the system.  If I drop evenly between my blogs, I will drop only 200 cards per blog.  I am losing out on potentially 100 more drops (if everyone reciprocates).  If this is the case, this blog will never make the top three spots nor will my other two blogs since I won’t be able to reciprocate everyone who drops on me.  I am also going to assume that the top three blogs are people who only have a single blog in the system.  If that is the case, they will be dropping 300 cards to my 200 on a daily basis.  Tell me how I ever catch up to the lost traffic.  The top spots got there by dropping 300 cards daily.

This change effects anyone who uses a shared computer and/or ip to do their drops.  Husbands and wives won’t be able to both have accounts and not effect each others ability to drop.  People won’t be able to drop (or be limited) from work if anybody else in the building does Entrecard.  And heaven forbid, if you have to use an internet cafe or library to drop.  Who knows if somebody already used up the 600 drops off those ips?

What’s the reason for this change?  Well, according to Phirate (one of the head guys of Entrecard):

It’s not a penalty, it’s just our only real rational response to people creating multiple “spam blogs” and going nuts dropping a thousand + per day. Unfortunately, some legitimate users will get caught in the cross-fire.

Well, go after the spam blogs.  Set up a system where the blogs have to be 30-60 days old and have 10 posts or so.  That should weed out a bunch of them right off the bat.  I would think they would rather be able to say that they have 7,000 good blogs in the system instead of 6,000 good and 1,000 not so good.

Another issue with this is that it is pretty easy to change your IP.  If you use AT&T like I do, it is simple (just a pain in the butt to have to do everyday).  I won’t go into how you do it, but if I know how to do it, the spammers definitely do to.  Also, another way around this is to use a proxy.  Again, if I figured this out, so can the spammers.

Entrecard, I love your system.  It does exactly what it is suppose to — it drives traffic to my blogs.  However, you are hurting the very people who make the system great.  I would think that you would want your best users to be able to put more of their quality blogs into the system.

If you agree, please let them know.  From the few people I have talked to like Jenn, I am not the only one who doesn’t agree with this change.  Entrecard has made tons of changes based on what the users want.  I am hoping that the users can bring about change again.

Have you visited the Izea Forum yet? If not, you definitely need to go visit the boards. Why? Well, first of all, they just completely redid them. They have a brand new look. It is a tad different looking than the old boards, but it only takes a little while to figure our your way around there. Another reason to check them out is because of the community. Izea posters are an awesome community to be a part of. These are some of the kindest most caring people I have ever met. Some of us have met in real life, but the majority of us have never seen each other ever. However, if you are having a problem with an opportunity you took, problems with your blog, or even problems at home, there is someone who is willing to give you a hand. For free. I know, it is hard to believe, but it is true. When I was pregnant with Will, there was even a thread guessing when he was going to be born! (I forgot who won that one — Amy, maybe?). All I know is that I have met some of my very best online friends on there. Another cool feature on the new boards is that you can report people if you have a problem with them. Instead of a discussion turning into a flame war, you can get a moderator to put a stop to it and reign everyone in. Speaking of moderators, I am one there, so that alone should make you check it out. LOL. In all seriousness, the Izea forums is your one stop shop for both information and community. Go check it out!