A first cut at an icon for the Carnival of Debt Reduction
November 18th, 2005 | by mbhunter |
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I was recently contacted by folks at WordOfBlog.net about advertising the Carnival of Debt Reduction with them. Since FREE is my favorite price, I signed up with them.
It’s a pretty nice interface that they have. You can upload a “badge” — an icon representing the event, in this case a carnival — and they host the image for you and put it in a keyword-searchable directory. They also give you HTML code that you can pop into your posts, sidebar, whatever. They have over 300 events on their site, and it looks like more are coming on every day. Pure viral marketing.
The code that they have doesn’t quite work for posts like I have here, so I played with it a little bit until it did what I wanted. Here’s the code that I put into this post:
<table align="left"><tr><td><a href="http://www.wordofblog.net/redirect.php?id=383"><img src="http://www.wordofblog.net/ad_images/383503.GIF" border="0" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td><font size="1"><center>Heard the <a href="http://www.wordofblog.net/info.php?id=383">Word of Blog?</a></center></td></tr></table>
They are very responsive. They looked at my blog to find good places to post the badges, and they politely asked my permission before contacting people on the schedule. (I asked them not to at this time, so I could introduce you to the service here.)
So, if you have a blog event that you want to promote, you might consider these guys at WordOfBlog.net
Also, if you have an artistic bent and want to improve on my design, go for it! I’ll give you credit on the guidelines page and put a link to your site!
2 Responses to “A first cut at an icon for the Carnival of Debt Reduction”
By Flexo on Nov 18, 2005 | Reply
I was contacted by them as well for the CoPF, but I’m undecided. Their “Heard the Word of Blog?” link turns me off. It would be just as easy to create a badge without them.
By mbhunter on Nov 18, 2005 | Reply
Flexo, I agree — you’ve hit on a couple of important issues regarding free advertising.
The link under the badge can be distracting, but it does help their pagerank and other measures of the importance of their link, which in turn improves the traffic to their site, which increases the clickthroughs to my site. And for now, I get to outsource a little bit of bandwidth, some tracking statistics, and some exposure for the carnival that I didn’t have before.
For now, I see this as another opportunity to get the word out about the CoDR, which, using the CoPF as a benchmark, still has some opportunity for growth.