Cataclysm Question Contest
With the lifting of the NDA on World of Warcraft: Cataclysm and the closed beta underway, what a better time to run a contest and get some questions answered! With that being said, tomorrow marks the first day of our new contest, the Cataclysm Question Contest.
This is the first event of this kind that we have ever attempted, so please bear with us as we work out the kinks. We've dumped almost a hundred hours into brainstorming, coordination with vendors and setting up all the contest pages and widgets, with much more work still left to be done! The contest premise is simple; ask or answer questions on EpicAdvice.com for a chance to win some goodies!
We have 2 different contest formats running simultaneously; Weekly Random Giveaways & Prizes for the best contributors. The details for these two different contest types can be found on our prizes page, as well as a scoreboard for contributors. The contests will all Officially begin at 4pm CST on Friday July 9th, 2010. We will include all historical questions involving Cataclysm as well for the first week. Just be sure to tag your questions with the "Cataclysm" tag when asking! Answers on questions tagged Cataclysm will automatically be entered.
So what can you do to win? Just participate! Are you in the beta and have the scoop on a specific class? Be sure to answer those questions! Not in the beta and are well-read in the subject by the forums? You've got a great shot too!
We want to thank everyone involved for making this possible, including all of our community members. EpicAdvice has really shined over the past months since launch, this is just one of the methods we are planning on to reward those who are committed!
EpicPlan.com Open Beta Starting!
Alright folks, we've been working so hard on this project since last October, even earlier if you consider "concept mockups". Don't know what EpicPlan.com is? Well let me fill you in a little bit...
Here at EpicAdvice.com we decided it was time to leap forward with a new style of planning technology. We identified a need for graphical planning within the WoW universe and created EpicPlan.com; a graphical planning tool for WoW Quests/Encounters.
We are working diligently on the "EpicPlan Editor" to make it as easy as possible. We wanted a tool that any WoW player could use to graphically express and show the steps involved in a Quest, Raid Boss or Encounter. Not only on our website, but YOUR website; embedding our plans into your blog/news/forum/whatever. No more YouTube videos which you have to watch and rewind to TRY to figure out what they are doing. A simple Icon Animation with a text description of each step in the process.
Keep in mind, this is NOT a finished product, we are in beta, everything you see if subject to change and probably will (with your feedback!). We have pretty big plans for the EpicPlan engine, which we hope to roll out and elaborate on in the near future.
EpicPlan.com is ready for its open beta period!
Everyone is more than welcome to register on EpicPlan.com, but you are going to need the "Beta Key" we are going to be providing and periodically changing on this blog.
For those of you wanting the TLDR version:
- Copy this Beta Key or just remember it: moredots
- Move on over to http://epicplan.com/beta/signup.
- Fill out your information and enter the "Beta Key" from EpicAdvice.com in the box.
- *Poof* your account is created and you are now logged in. We've also emailed you with some helpful links and your login information!
Easy enough eh? Well we hope you find the entire site that easy to use! If you have any questions or need help figuring out how to use the editor, here's a few way to get in contact with us or with other users of the site.
Help Site: http://help.epicplan.com
Change Password: http://epicplan.com/user/profile/self
Our IRC Channel: irc.freenode.net #epicadvice or http://epicadvice.com/chat
Please don't hesitate to let us know what you think!
Advertising, ProjectWonderful and World of Warcraft Bloggers!
Been a while since I've written a blog post, which I promise I am trying hard to find time to write more about the events surrounding EpicAdvice.com and our small network we are working to establish. Its been an incredibly busy time since the holidays and we are working very hard to improve upon our site, as well as bring a few new sites online in the coming months.
Anyways, onto...
As you may have noticed, we are now using ProjectWonderful for all of our advertising needs. This is an experiment we hope many of you will join in with us! First off, a bit about ProjectWonderful, which in my opinion, lives up to its name. ProjectWonderful is an advertising solution for blogs, forums and websites. It runs on an "Infinite Auction" (Click for their explanation) system that continues forever, keeping prices pretty low for people interested in advertising their product/website. As of this blog post, most of the ads on EpicAdvice.com are priced around $0.03/day. Cheap eh? $0.03/day for 30 days on EpicAdvice.com will yeild you about 50,000 banner impressions in a month, for the low-low price of $0.90/month! (Again, at the time of this writing)
Little more information....
From someone who wants to promote their website's online status/brand whatever, the way it works is you put a bid in for a banner that you'd be willing to pay for a specific ad-zone for the entire day... this isn't a CPM/CPC system where you pay for impressions or clicks, you actually pay what you feel its worth for the entire day of advertising on our site. You can set up the bid to automatically increase to a set amount if someone out bids you, or you can just read the email notifications that you've been outbid and manually adjust your bid if you feel its worth it! You also get statistics on how well your banner is performing (page views/unique visitors), how many people have clicked through to your website and what your click through rate is.
On the other end of the spectrum, for those looking to advertise/put banners on their website, It allows you to create your own zones on your website and create auctions for them as well, allowing others who may be interested in advertising on your site to easily put their banners up using the auction system. You get to pick the size, how many banners are in the area, and even a minimum bid to place a banner. You can view every bid placed on your website, choose who can and cannot advertise, as well as view all of your statistical information mentioned above.
Pretty cool huh? We are actually using it to advertise about EpicAdvice.com on a few other sites such as WanderingGoblin (blog) and NPC Comic (comics). Pretty much any website we see in ProjectWonderful that involves World of Warcraft or Gamers, we are trying to get in and do some advertising on, but there aren't many signed up yet. Might as well support the community right? Well that's what we are asking of any blogger or website owner that might be interested! If you run a site and are looking to make a little money, sign up for ProjectWonderful and drop us a line so we can look for you. We are more than happy to advertise on WoW blogs we find useful and interesting to support the community (as long as they don't break the bank).
EpicAdvice.com started out with $10 in our account (Easily transfered from PayPal) and have been running ads on a few websites for about 2 weeks now. Our current balance is sitting at $6.58, so realistically we've been paying ~$2/week to advertise across tons of websites, generating a decent amount of traffic. We've seen a few people click over from advertisements, register an account and ask questions! It's really that easy and really doesn't cost an incredible amount; the money you make from ads can be used directly to pay for ads on other sites or transferred back out to your PayPal account.
So if you run a website, jump on board with us, its free and might make you some money, maybe even some from us 
Note: This isn't a sponsored post or even a referal link, we don't make a dime off of you signing up or using ProjectWonderful, I just personally wrote this as I have been extremely happy with their product!
(Let us know what you think in the comments!)
Twitter about EpicAdvice
- #Warcraft What is the addon where you get a small map in BGs?: Hi Folks, I used to have this addon, but I don't... http://t.co/o0nQsP27
- #Warcraft Install Problems: I have left WoW 3 months ago but I decided to go back, I wanted to reinstall WoW Van... http://t.co/euQqMhfw
- #Warcraft healbot is not showing debuff in End Time, Twilight, Well of Eternity Heroics: Anyone else having this... http://t.co/HrH7bjjD
- #Warcraft Has cataclysm introduced any changes to BG reputation gains?: Howdy folks. I stopped playing once my ... http://t.co/xA9Iv0E1
- #Warcraft Warrior pvp guide: Is there a good arms warrior pvp guide out there that is not out of date? http://t.co/0K5eCmJm
- #Warcraft How do I see more names on the Send Mail Window?: Ok, so I have friends/guildies who like to put weird... http://t.co/G4MVW7r3
- #Warcraft How do you access the Molten Front dailies?: I haven't gone through the Molten Front dailies yet. I've... http://t.co/DpD6S1Wd
- #Warcraft Tarecgosa = Tyrygosa?: Does anyone know what Tyrygosa is up to these days? For a brief introduction, s... http://t.co/1qHOXFy
- @spazmoose yeah, were still hammering away on this new engine. The search is a little funky on r2 as well.
- #Warcraft Downloading mirror patches - need advice: Im currently deployed to Afghanistan. we just set up a new i... http://t.co/DqYCge2
Questions on Epic Advice
- What is the addon where you get a small map in BGs?
- Install Problems
- healbot is not showing debuff in End Time, Twilight, Well of Eternity Heroics
- Has cataclysm introduced any changes to BG reputation gains?
- Warrior pvp guide
- How do I see more names on the Send Mail Window?
- How do you access the Molten Front dailies?
- Tarecgosa = Tyrygosa?
- Downloading mirror patches - need advice
- Thrall quest line