Entrecard is a blogging service that has quickly emerged onto the blogger scene over the last couple of months. In a nutshell, it’s a free social advertising network for bloggers, and brings the concept of exchanging business card onto the Net. Entrecard allows you to advertise your 125×125 button (for free) on any blog in their network. You pay with Entrecard credits instead of real money, and you earn those credits by visiting other blogs and dropping off your Entrecard. It sounds complicated, but it’s really simple once you get used to it. Don’t let the complex control panel scare you off!

Entrecard is the brain child of Graham Langdon, creator of the Million Dollar Wiki. Already, a number of well-known bloggers are using Entrecard, and it’s continuing to grow each day! And in just two months, Entrecard has grown by leaps and bounds. Over 2000 free ads are now placed daily, and over half a million cards have been exchanged between site owners.

What are you waiting for?

Well wishes for a prosperous 2008!
  - Zander

Who knew it was this easy to become a millionaire? And here I’ve been doing things the hard way..

If you’ve been a regular reader of this blog, you’ve probably noticed that my posting frequency has slowed down considerably. My primary source of income is from my e-commerce site, and December has been a record month for us! Over the years, more people have started doing their Christmas shopping online. And I can’t say I really blame them, it’s absolute chaos on the roads right now..

We noticed that we were getting WAY more traffic than in years past, and certain product pages were getting thousands of hits each day. (And these were pages that didn’t have any sort of SEO done to them!) Google Analytics showed us that all of the traffic was coming from Google. Next, a trip to Google Webmaster Tools showed us that we were ranking #1 for the pages that were getting all of the traffic!!

So how did a bunch of pages without ANY search engine optimization end up in the #1 spots on Google? It’s called Google Universal Search. Universal Search is a new system that Google rolled out back in May 2007. It blends listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages. You’ve probably seen it over the past few months, as YouTube videos and Google News articles started showing up among your regular search results. What worked for us was that we were submitting XML feeds to Google Base (formerly Froogle), and they decided to include Base products in the search results. Since virtually no one uses Google Base, we completely dominated our niche!

[Edited January 5th: Apparently Google has decided to remove Base products from Universal Search, and traffic has dropped drastically..]

John Chow made a great post the other day about how bad press is good for business. It seems counterintuitive, but we’ve seen it happen time and time again. Done right, it’s a great method to drive traffic to your site and generate lots of comments. But you’ve got to have the goods to keep the readers coming back, or else it’s about as useful as a Digg blast.

It’s all about CONTROVERSY.. Need proof?

• John Chow’s Battles With Google brought him attention from all over the world, and took his blog to the next level.
• A piece on the Top 50 Cowboys Players from a BRAND NEW Cowboys blog rattled people the wrong way, and that post alone has received over 10K pageviews!
• The Michael Vick controvery touched a nerve with dog owners around the world, and this football blog ended up receiving national attention from major sports media outlets!

Used sparingly, this is a great method to generate buzz and traffic for your site.. Good luck!

Zac Johnson decided to use an incentive (a free MoneyReign T-Shirt) to generate more tips for his Top Spots list.. The Top Spots list is a “Fancy-Schmancy Tip Jar For Your Blog”, powered by Jim Kukral’s ScratchBack. For people that don’t want the headache of manually coding up their own Paypal Donations button, ScratchBack is a pretty easy alternative.

My only complaint with ScratchBack is that they’ve hardcoded all links with a nofollow tag, instead of giving users the option whether or not to use the nofollow tag on outgoing links..