This is a guest post from Dot Com Dud, a blogger who catalogues his journey towards earning a full-time income online on DotComDud.com. You can also follow him on Twitter.

If you look at my traffic you’ll see that Entrecard is responsible for the majority of the visits my blog gets, so naturally you’d think that I am a huge fan of the service… well you’d be half right.

Entrecard has seen it’s fair share of praises and criticism but as time goes on the arguments seem to be piling up on the negative side. For those who are new to Entrecard, this post aims to introduce you to the service and explain some of the advantages and pitfalls you should be aware of.

What is Entrecard?

The basic premise of the system is this; you install the Entrecard widget on your blog, usually in the sidebar and the widget will display a 125 x 125 ad. Other Entrecard users can ‘drop’ on your widget which will give both you and the dropper 1 Entrecard credit (or EC). You can also go around ‘dropping’ on other blog’s widgets (earning up to 300 EC per day). Once you have accumulated enough credits, you can spend them to have your 125 x 125 image appear on another blog’s widget for a day at a time. The whole thing is simple to set up and easy to use, you’ll be up and running in no time.

The idea is that traffic is generated not only from other blogger’s coming to your site to drop on your widget but also from the readers of other blogs clicking on your 125 x 125 ads. This idea is great in theory but in practice it’s not without it’s problems, when it comes to Entrecard there is both good and bad news.

You Will Get Traffic

This is the good news. Just having the widget present is going to get you some hits, maybe not thousands but traffic you didn’t have before. If you actively drop and advertise then the amount of traffic you’ll get will increase, you can count on that. Still we’re not talking about thousands here (for most blogs) but if you use the service right, getting 100+ visitors a day from Entrecard is possible.

So what about the bad news? Much of the criticism aimed at Entrecard revolves around the actual quality of the traffic rather than the quantity. The fact is that a lot of the traffic you get through Entrecard only come to your site for one reason, to drop & run. This leads to high bounce rates and low conversions, hit & run droppers don’t stick around to read your posts, let alone comment or subscribe.

Is It All Bad?

No, some of the traffic is genuine. If your content is at all interesting then you should get at least some passing comments, maybe even some subscribers. It’s really up to you if the effort in earning credits is worth the results you get but there are some things you can do to improve the situation.

The thing about droppers is that you already know what they want and where their attention will be. I’ve had some success gaining subscribers by giving away EC because it’s much more tempting to win a few thousand EC than dropping for them. Also, by placing things around the widget that you want to draw attention to, you can increase the probability that droppers will be enticed by them.

Is It Worth It?

For new and developing blogs, I’d recommend it in a heartbeat. The amount of effort you put into it is up to you and while you do get more out of Entrecard the more you put in, the return may not be worth the investment. Personally I still display the widget on my blog but I don’t spend much time dropping to earn EC anymore.

However, once your blog is gaining enough traffic from other sources then Entercard might be not worth the effort and eventually it isn’t going to be worth the space it occupies either. These are things you’ll need to address once you’re blog reaches a decent level of traffic though, so you can cross that bridge when you get to it.

To Conclude…

Yes Entrecard will bring you traffic and some of it will be genuine. The rest of it is largely hit & run traffic which you’ll need to get creative with if you want to make them stick around. If you’ve got the space for it out then it’s worth trying out.

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Here are a few bullet points on what you should do before you start building a website. Before I start building I like to draw the entire design on a piece of paper and build it from there. That way you can you can save time instead of editing in the computer. Here is a simple checklist I follow when building a website.

Layout

-Consistent navigation bar and main logo.

-Page footer that includes copyright information and a contact email address.

-Remember that most people use an 800 x 600 resolution so you should design your pages to be no less than 750 pixels wide.

-Make sure the text on the page is easy to read. If you use a black background it is best to use white text so that people can read it.

-Grab attention with the homepage. Put as much relevant information on the main page as you can

-Check Browser Compatibility

Navigation

-If you are using buttons as your text, add links to the bottom of your page. Some people use text browsers and search bots only look at text not pictures.

-Make sure the homepage is under 50 kb for fast loading

-Navigation should be big and simple and easy to find

-Check Links to ensure they are not broken

Search Engine Optimization

-Make sure your meta tags are defined (title, keywords, description)

-Make sure all your alt tags are filled in

-Make sure there are plenty of links and they are not broken

-Preview you pages in a text browsers

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I started this website you are on November 15th which was only 11 days ago. And I have to say that I am pretty proud of myself. My goal was to try and build this site up, not to make money, but to prove to myself that I really knew what I was doing. I have these other sites that I am trying to make successful but this one is blowing past the others. Granted my other sites are seasonal and this is clearly not the season but I am glad to have all these visitors to my site. I wanted to show you my Google analytics because I am really surprised by it. Almost no traffic to my website comes from any search engines. Again I know this site is only 11 days old but it’s amazing to me how fast it’s grown using just twitter, stumbleupon and MyblogLog. Take a look below at my main page in my Google Analytics.

I think it’s pretty awesome that search engines don’t play a part in my site traffic. In 11 days this site has grown faster than all my other sites. Here are some of the factors that I think are contributing to my traffic.

- On Twitter I like to connect to people that share my interest, which is blogging and SEO. So buy sharing that interest my blog offers insight to what I am trying to do and gives SEO experts an outlet to share and to teach me about my websites.

- On Stumbleupon I connect with people who again share my interest.

- Anything that interest me, any widgets,any links I share. I post immediatly on Twitter or I link to it on my blog.

- All I do is read other blogs, for my own learning purposes and to see what other bloggers are doing and to try to get influenced. Not only do I read them but I also comment on them which provides a link to my site.

All of these factors and more are what I think plays a major role in this websites development. I just can’t wait to see what the search engines will bring me. I probably don’t even show up right now.

Thanks Everyone!

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I am using Google analytics and webmaster tools to track my websites and I have been using it for about a month. The problem that I’m having is that my page rank is still at 0. That’s not helping me at all. I posted a question on Twitter this morning -

“I just cannot get my page rank up, what’s with me. It’s taking forever.”

@yuyudin responded to me with some really helpful tips on trying to get my page rank up. She mentioned at one point that page rank was overrated but still helped me out anyway. Here are some of the tips she gave me about this site.

Increasing Your Google Page rank Tips
- If you are using Wordpress to host your blog make sure you create different more specific link categories. Which I implemented. She mentioned to split it into categories like SEO Tips and so forth. You can see how I did it on the right hand side of this site.

- If you have articles on your website or blog posts, you should like to other posts in your blog or website that are relevant. So for instance on SwimUniversity.com I have a blog post about Killing Swimming Pool Algae. In that post I mention that one way of killing algae is by using pool shock. I have another article called The Right Way To Shock Your Pool. So anytime I see pool shock in the Algae Article, I like that Pool Shock word in the Algae Article to the Shock Article. Because when Google scans your website it picks up links faster than all other text.

- The quickest way to get inbound links to your website is by signing up for Social Media sites and using links to that site to your site.

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When I first started this site using wordpress I went to serveral different websites looking for the best wordpress plugins to get me started. I’m sure I’ll be adding more, but if you are starting a blog using wordpress I suggest you add these plugins.

1. Akismet -Believe it or not you are going to get spam comments from drug companies and porn sites. This plugin weeds them out. Without this plugin you will get a ton of useless comments. Plus it’s time consuming to delete them all. This is a must have plugin.
2. All in One SEO Pack – If you want your blog to be picked up by the search engines (which we all do) you are going to need this plugin. It is one of the most popular wordpress plugins. It allows to you add all your meta data in one simple form.
3. cforms – On my contact page I have an example of this. It will create forms that users can fill out and it will send that information to your email. Pretty simple to use as well. And It’s fully customizable for any style form.
4. Google XML Sitemaps -Google can take a while to index your pages, especially if you are a new blog. This plugin creates a dynamic sitemap that constantly updates everytime you add to your blog. As long as you submit this sitemap to Google using Webmaster Tools, your webpages will be constantly indexed so that google doesnt have to pick them up naturally (which could take a while).
5. Simple Tags – Instead of trying to think of tags to relate you posts to for SEO purposes, this plugin scans your post and the internet and comes up with tags automatically so you don’t have to think about it. A huge time saver!
6. Subscribe To Comments – some people after they comment on your blog want to know what other people are saying. This plugin allows commentors to get an email every time someone else comments on that same post they commented on.
7. Tweet This – This plugin sends a tweet using your twitter account about this post. So if you want to share this post with your twitter followers, you can easily!
8. WP-Polls – People love polls, they are easy, quick and fun and this plugin makes it even easier. Create multiple polls and have them rotate on your blog or just create one. Immediate poll results.
9. WP Ajax Edit Comments – this plugin allows those leaving comments to edit their comments for a short period of time after they leave a comment.

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