A good news for all new Publishers of Google AdSense. From now on the special Personal Identification Number (PIN) will arrive in your mailbox earlier! Google will send you a PIN when you have earned $10 as a AdSense Publisher. PIN program is used by AdSense to make sure that the account details publishers provide are valid and correct. Earlier it was $50, that you need to earn to get a PIN.

PINs are printed on white 4.5 x 6 inch (11.4 x 15.2 cm) postcards and sent via standard mail. PINs typically arrive within 2-4 weeks, but may take longer depending on your location. If you do not receive your first PIN, you can request for 2 replacement PINs. So be careful about your correct mailing address.

Why PIN is important? PINs are necessary to verify the accuracy of your contact information and to help ensure that you can receive your payments. You’ll have 6 months from the initial issue date to enter your PIN. If you have not entered a PIN within 4 months, AdSense will replace the paid advertisements on your site with unpaid Public Service Ads. If you still have not entered your PIN within 6 months, your account will be disabled and your unpaid earnings will be refunded to the appropriate advertisers.

So, if your all-time earnings are between $10 and $50, you may expect a mail from Google, containing your PIN. Check you mailbox today! Then visit the links in the ‘Required Actions’ box on your Payment History page and enter your PIN. What’s next? Wait till you earn $100 and get your first cheque from AdSense!

Still looking for a free WordPress theme for your blog? Take a look at Forte theme for WordPress, released by WPThemesPlugin. I’m sure that this free theme is going to win your heart. Why? Because, it is an amazing three in one theme! You have three options to select your layout of choice from your theme admin panel. You can either select a normal 2-column layout, a Magazine style layout or a list styled layout. I’m telling you, it is really a great theme, that you can grab for free.

You can view the demo of Forte here. I’m sure that after testing it, you are going to want the theme. So, the download link is here. Don,t forget to give your big thanks to the theme designer for releasing such a beautiful wordpress theme for free!

Forte is very easy to use and tweak! How it works? After uploading and activating the theme, you will notice a new tab called Mzine CMS option. From this tab you will be able to control the style of your theme. There you can also set your preferred font family, font size and many other customization options. Forte uses custom fields and also supports plugins. Even you can define font colors, navigation colors etc from the admin panel.

Forte is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, which means that you are free to edit the theme as long as you keep the two links in the footer. Get it today before something bad happens!

Love the cute, little Twitter? Then you are going to love the new Prologue theme for WordPress! A described by Matt, Prologue works like a group Twitter, ideally for 3-15 people to let each other know what they’re up to. First take a look at the screenshot below. It looks more like the Twitter, than a normal blog. But, it has comments, permalinks, RSS feeds, Gravatars, XML-RPC, and everything you’d expected in a blog. I am sure that it is going to rock the blogosphere!

You can view the demo of Prologue theme here. It is simple, clean and cool. I think that this is ideal for a group of friends or a small office staff! Prologue theme is available as open source under the GPL. Get it from here.

How Prologue WordPress Theme works? Just read the following description, that I took from the official blog post.

Basically how it works is when someone has the ability to post to a blog they see a short form at the top of the home page with a post box and tags. There they can post short messages about what they’re doing.

Below the posting box is a list of everyone’s latest tweet or message, with their Gravatar next to it. You can click on an author to see all their messages, or a tag to see all of the messages in a given tag (which we use for projects). There are RSS feeds for everything: the entire prologue, each author, each tag, and even combination or searches can be subscribed to in your RSS reader.

You can have a custom header to personalize the Prologue for your group, and just like any WordPress.com blog you have advanced privacy options: the blog can be public, public but invisible to search engines, and password-protected (available only to members).

Prologue theme has started a new style of WordPress blogging. It was beyond my imagination! What about you? Do give your reactions.

Need some free advertising for your blog? Go and get a free business card for your blog! What? Don’t worry, I am not asking you to print some business cards. I am telling about Entrecard, a free service for blog promotion. It is very simple to use and needs a small space on your blog to start! You can see my entrecard on the sidebar. I have tested it for more than one month and the results are very positive. So, I would strongly suggest Entrecard for your blog.

What is an Entrecard?

Entrecard is a widget-based, free, advertising service for bloggers who own and operate their own blog. In this interesting service, every blog is represented by a a 125×125 image, called as an ‘Entrecard’. An Entrecard may be called as the business card for a blog. The system works by exchange of entrecards via a widget that every member places on their blogs. With entrecard you can promote your blog and launch free advertising campaigns within the network.

Entrecard has a point system, called Entrecard Credits! These credits are used as the virtual money within the system. Entrecard credits are used to purchase placement for your card on other blogs via the widget. You earn a credit every time you drop your card in someone else’s widget, every time someone leaves you a card, and every time someone buys placement for their card on your blog.

How to start with Entrecard?

It is very simple to start. All you need is a blog, that you write in English. Get a free Entrecard account here. Once your account is activated and you are logged in, you will see the entrecard dashboard. This is the place from where you can run and manage your advertising campaigns. Prepare your entrecard with your own design or by using a default one and put the widget code on your blog. Once the automatic widget scanner detects the widget on your blog, you can start your journey!

In the right side of your dashboard, you will see four small columns. These columns will show the interested advertisers, your ads, ads running on your widget and recent card droppers on your site. On the left side of your dashboard, you can see your quick stats, account settings, most recent transactions etc. In the header tabs you will find links to the dashboard, widget code, campaign, entrecard shop, entrecard blog , entrecard forum, statistics and help section.

Use the campaign tab to view the entrecards of other blogs. You can view them by category, most recent, most popular, most recommended, lowest wait, your favourites or by your nearby. To advertise on a particular entrecard, just click on the advertise link below that card (if available) and then click again to confirm the sale. Remember you must have enough credits to purchase a spot! Once the entrecard owner approves your proposal, the system will assign a particular date and time for your advert. On that date and time your entrecard will appear on that blog and will run for 24 hrs.

My experience with Entrecard:

I am using entrecard on my blog and I am satisfied with the system. To test the system I dropped lot of cards in the beginning and eventually decreased it to zero per day. The results are amazing. I got over 1000 visits from entrecard to my blog. (Don’t laugh at my stats! I have no time for dropping 300 cards a day!) I also managed to advertise on JohnChow.Com, from where I got 65 visits! During my zero drop days I got 20-30 visits. But it reduced my ad spot value from 96 credits/day to 10 credits/day!

The most interesting result was the drop ratio. I dropped 719 cards and in return I got 742 card drops on my blog. So, it means that the more you drop, the more drops you will receive. So don’t wait and start dropping your cards. It is fun too, if you have some spare time!

Advantages of Entrecard for Bloggers:

• Drive a huge amount of traffic to your blog, without paying a cent!
• Discover new blogs in your blog niche.
• Build good relationship with new bloggers.
• May get some good blog subscribers.
• You may find some new sponsors too!

Some tips for using Entrecard:

• Drop cards on different blogs. Drop as much as you can. The general principle is the more you drop, the more drops you receive on your blog.

• Get an eye catching card for your blog. It may help in getting more drops.

• Place your Entrecard widget on a higher place. You may place it on your sidebar or on your header. Avoid placing it on your blog footer.

• Write recommendations and send messages to your favourite bloggers. It will help in drawing their attention towards your blog.

• Visit the Entrecard forum and try to participate in the discussions.

Entrecard gives you traffic. But, are they useful? Many people thinks that entrecard traffic is useless. Because, most of the entrecard visitor comes for dropping cards. They stays hardly a few seconds on your blog. With growing popularity of this system, I have a growing fear on my mind! Is there any chance that Google AdSense will term these as invalid impressions? What you think? I know that many of blog readers are using entrecard. So, please feel free to express your reactions.

Blog statistics is an important part of blogging. It provides some valuable information about your blog visitors. There are many free and paid services that can provide good statistics. I am sure that you are using one or more such services on your blog. So, I am not going to tell about them. But, do you know that WordPress has it’s own stats system? Yes, I am talking about the WordPress.com Stats plugin. This plugin provides you some good stats about your blog visitors. And the good thing is that it runs on the servers of WordPress!

Like Akismet, you need your API Key to run this plugin on your blog. Data collection and processing runs on the servers of WordPress. It means that you don’t need to worry about extra server load on your hosting account.

WordPress.com Stats plugin collects information about your blog’s pageviews, popular posts and pages, source of traffic and what people click on when they leave. Then the stats are displayed in a frame on you blog’s dashboard. You will need to be logged in at WordPress.com to see the stats. The stats are shown in graphs and several sections of charts. Even each post has its own graph!

Installation of WordPress.com Stats plugin:

• Download the plugin from here.
• Extract and upload the stats.php file to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
• Activate the plugin from the ‘Plugins‘ menu in your WordPress dashboard.
• It will ask you to enter your WordPress.com API key. Enter it.
• That’s it! Within a few minutes this plugin will start showing the stats.

Take a look at the video. It shows a picture that created a hot debate last week! This recently released picture of the surface of Mars, taken by the NASA rover Spirit apparently showing a human-like figure. Several Internet sites have suggested that the figure could be alive. Many people thinks that this is a female figure! So, does this picture proves that life exists on planet Mars? I don’t think so. As astronomers says, I believe that this is just another rock! What you think?

Sunday! Let’s talk about some good blog posts, that I found while browsing through different blogs. Yes I am talking about the Sunday Links. For this week I have got ProBlogger, Daily Blog Tips, Emoms at Home and Entrepreneurs Journey. I hope that my readers will find these links interesting and informative. Don’t forget to give your comments!

• Thinking about writing some outstanding posts to get popularity or to hit the Digg front page? Know more about the characteristics of outstanding by reading about the “Top 10 Hallmarks of Outstanding Content“.

• Stepping into the world of Affiliate Marketing? Read “Affiliate Marketing from the Perspective of a Blogger” and get inspired!

• Freelance writing could earn you some good amount of money, if you are good enough at writing! Read “Six Ways to Get Started as a Freelance Writer” to get some good ideas.

• What you know about the Twitter? How to use it? Read the ProBlogger post “How to Use Twitter” and get some nice tips.

Feel free to contact EarnBlogger regarding the Sunday Links section.