For those of you that are long time readers of this blog you probably have noticed I’ve been a little lazy lately. Actually its not that I’ve been lazy as I’ve been working my tail off on other projects and as result have not had time to dedicate to this blog. I’ve not been spending my time wisely.

I’ve been reading a post series from Problogger on Ways to let your blog go and its a very good series, possibly one of the best things I’ve ever read on Problogger. One of posts in the series talks about time management for your blog activities and it describes exactly what has happened to me lately. I’ve become stretched too thinly with my activities. This is actually something that happens to a lot of people who earns money on the net and identify themselves as Internet Marketers.

I’ve seen person after person on various Internet marketing forums where someone states they are working their tail off but just can’t seem to catch a break and as a result they make very little or no money at all. Eventually they just give up. The gurus want you jumping from task to task, from site to site as it helps them squeeze more money out of you and you purchase their next major eBook that promises you the one thing that will launch your success. The truth is these people only want your money and they don’t want you to be successful. I’ve read quite a few of these so called eBooks and they pretty much all say the same thing. You don’t need any books, you can get everything you need from blogs just like this one or Problogger.net

Content is the only thing that matters when it comes to making money. Don’t try to sell the Make Money products as an affiliate. If you want to sell affiliate products then find products that appeal to a large segment of the population and just spend time creating good content. It may not pay off immediately for you, but it will pay off in the end.

These so called Gurus and I won’t mention their names have not done much in this world except build up massive lists and re-hash some content in an eBook with the same information you could find for free on the net with some well crafted Google searches. I don’t know of a single well known Internet Marketing Guru that has built any substantial site where you can see concrete proof of how their tactics work. What is the reason for this? If you do see their site’s its apparent those sites are not high traffic and if you have been around the net any length of time you know a site must have traffic to make any decent money.

The Gurus make their money by selling other people guides on how to make money, there is no other revenue stream that they use to make money and that is why they need you.

You will be a lot better off just picking a couple of websites in your chosen niche and focusing all your available time and energy on making those sites the best they can be. Spending time on 30-40 sites at a time will only serve one purpose and that is that none of the sites will become a money maker and allow you to realize your dreams.

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One of the great things about my participation in Entrecard is finding all the great blogs to read, Even if you have not added a blog to Entrecard, you may want to spend sometime browsing through the listings. I’m sure if you dedicate a little time then you will find some great additions for your RSS reader. By the way if you have not subscribed here then please do so now. I give 10 entrecard credits for a subscribe by email that gets activated.

Well back to the point of this post. One of the blogs I’ve become a subscriber of is Dat Money, Jason is a great guy and someone to watch. I’m sure he will become a household name around the Internet forums. Not only are his post informative they are also amusing at times, but don’t take my word for it, check it out yourself.

One post the caught my attention was his advice on being yourself because you are not Shoemoney or Problogger. It reminded me of my post series about finding your own voice. His latest post talks about how some people are sick of make money blogs well I’m not one of them. I learn something new from every one of these types of blogs I read. It may be similar information or something that I already know, but every blogger puts their own twist on the information and deepens my understanding of processes and allows me to more effectively utilize those strategies.

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John Cow thinks so with his latest post in why he is leaving Entrecard. His post has sparked a lot of controversy and at the time of this writing spawned several additional posts around the blogshpere with people defending his stance or defending Entrecard. I’m going to take neither side in this blog post.

John makes some valid points. I’ve looked at my traffic from Entrecard and I have similar results as what John is showing in terms of bounce rates, time on site, etc.. So only taking those items into account, it would seem that Entrecard is not really the best system, but there is more to it than just drops. Now while my bounce rate is fairly high, I have seen some other benefits. my subscriber count has increased as well as my Technorati ranking has increased. I can only assume that my subscribers increased because of Entrecard as I’m not aware of any way to tie new subscribers to how they actually found their way onto my site, but I can say the increase in Technorati ranking is a direct result of Entrecard. I’ve gained quite a few links from blogs that would not have linked to me if it had not been for Entrecard. These bloggers found this site as a result of Entrecard and as a result they linked to one of my posts. I’ve done the same of other bloggers as a result of a post I found on their blog while dropping a card.

Now John says that the people who are more active in the system gain the highest ad price, even though Graham says its not related to how many cards you drop. Ad price of blogs are determined by the number of times someone drops a card on your site per day multiplied by 2 and averaged over the last 5 days. This is my understanding of the system and the way ad price is calculated. The number of cards you drop is not considered in the calculation of your advertising price. But while there may not be a direct factor in this calculation there is some correlation between the number of card drops you drop and the number of drops you receive. Why this correlation exists is not totally clear, but it has to do with the inbox. Entrecard users tend to drop on the people who last dropped on them so a lot of people drop on the people in their inbox first. I personally don’t think this is the best strategy. The other strategy that a lot of people use is to just open up a particular category and start dropping on everyone in the category starting with who ever is at the top, which means the prices at the top always seem to grow more than the blogs lower in the category. Is this because people get tried of dropping and never make it to the bottom. I don’t know what others do, but this is how I drop cards and I very rarely make it all the way to the bottom of a particular category  unless its is very small.

I used to spend a good amount of time building up credits, but I only spend a few minutes a day now and I mostly just drop on sites which I’ve started reading as a result in my involvement in Entrecard. I would have never ran across these sites if it would not have been for Entrecard and if there where no other benefits from me having this little card in the sidebar than just me finding these sites, then the space is well utilized.

I’ve posted about Entrecard several times and every time I based the value in Entrecard in the community not the clicks. Entrecard may not be all that useful for blogs such as John Cow, or John Chow and Problogger( Darren has already said he gets paid and I’m sure John Chow does too), but for smaller blogs is a great system, not for the traffic, but for the networking possibilities it provides. Who knows these baby blogs of today may be the huge blogs of tomorrow. I’ve found several blogs on Entrecard that I fully expect to grow into huge blogs in the future and I’m getting links on those blogs. I for one am going to stick around Entrecard for a while and see where things go.

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