The new year is among us - build your bomb shelters, nail your doors shut, stock up on supplies - do not go outdoors - because the flying rainbow coloured elves plan to induce their ruthless reign onto mankind this year. Here’s a link (insert affiliate ID right here) for a bomb shelter construction company … oh oh and here’s another link for an online hardware store for those nails (affiliate ID here) .. oh and an online grocer (affiliate ID here). Do it before time runs out, and remember - do not for an instant leave your house. Now to get back to raising my feet and watching my statistics enlarge themselves for the next day or two.

You know, it isn’t much of a secret that this industry is extremely competitive and somewhat crowded. There’s a countless amount of internet marketing blogs and websites that promise to generate you millions of dollars, often with the promise of little work. They create false hope, and feast on the fears of their audience. They create the illusion that they’re offering a set golden priceless advice and strategies which cannot be obtained anywhere else on the planet. They’re everywhere - they’re like ants and they’ve all got the same ring to them. Why won’t they just disappear and save a hell of a lot of people, a hell of a lot of time and hell of a lot of money?

Why? Because this is business, and in business you play hardball. When there’s an opportunity to exploit a market of determined and ambitious people seeking to provide for themselves via the internet, you’d better believe that there’s a sea of people, who will not for a darn microsecond hesitate to seize the opportunity to practically rob you of your money with both hands and feet. And without starting a war with half these self proclaimed ‘A List Bloggers’, I’ve got to say, some of them are guilty of this very crime.

You know it never really occurred to me why some of these guys take every single opportunity possible to remind their audience of their self proclaimed status. Up until recently, I was convinced that their ego and self righteousness had ultimately driven them to believe they were Hollywood celebrities that the world was absolutely DYING to hear from. In their own little fantasy land, they’re convinced that it’s all eyes on them. They wholeheartedly believe that they’re invincible, and while these guys have their own cute little fan clubs, it’s without a glimmer of doubt safe to say that once it becomes abundant the advice they dish out is absolute rubbish and something in equal value to a shoelace a cat could have dragged around for a month, these groups of individuals who seem to direct mountains of praise to these frauds, will disappear.

You can think what you want, but I’m here to call it how it is. I refuse to sit back, and watch these guys increase the weight of their pockets, while a stack of unsuspecting people fall prey to these annoyingly selfish tactics. For starters, I have absolutely no problem with people including affiliate links in their posts - as long as these affiliates are wholeheartedly there for the genuine wellbeing of the target market. Enough with the crap.

“A List Bloggers” (I think I’ll call them ‘A List Liars’ - and please understand I’m only referring to a few here) are simply bloggers who made it by often capitalizing on the fears, ambitions and good will of many people. Most of them earned their status through deceit, often by forging the amount of feed subscribers and publicly displaying it on their blogs, exaggerating the amount of revenue they generate online and using black hat methods to grow their blog.

I understand black hat methods are fast becoming acceptable in the online arena (what ever happened to good old work?), but I don’t think it’s right to consider yourself king of the castle when you didn’t make it to where you are honestly. It’s flat out rude, and somewhat disgusting, that offering low quality, crappy posts has become something a lot of these guys deem to be normal. No I’m not talking about a lot of their recycled advice. You owe your readers more than that.

Then comes the type of advice they offer. Oh for the love of purple ducks, will you please be a little more original. Please? I mean come on, how many times can you change the wording for the same article. As if it wasn’t already hard enough to dig through a heap of crap that doesn’t relate to your topic, but now it’s almost impossible to find an article which actually relates to your niche that hasn’t already been recycled. Come on.. what gives?

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve got subscriptions to a few top bloggers feeds because I genuinely feel they’re here to assist their audience to the best of their ability. One person that really stands out, is Darren , who currently owns ProBlogger, who always goes above and beyond in his posts. His blog is by farr my favorite, and I’d definitely recommend you stop by to have a read. Another blog I try to keep up to date with is Shoemoney.com, which is always an interesting read. I enjoy reading about Jeremy’s ventures, and he often has some pretty clever and unique thoughts.

I don’t really remember how I came across Entrecard, but I’m definitely glad I did. While it’s a little too early to make any definitive conclusions on how effective this blog network is, I can safely say as of yet things have been pretty good - easily much better than expected.

Entrecard is practically a virtual business card which is specifically intended for bloggers. By ‘dropping’ your business card to other blog owners, or by simply receiving drops, you are awarded credits which may then be used to purchase advertising space on any blog which permits advertising. You may also sell, trade or give away your Entrecard credits.

Other blog owners need to access your site and click on your Entrecard widget in order to send you a drop, consequently yielding traffic. Now I know what you’re thinking … everyone knows this isn’t going to work out because any blog owner visiting to submit a drop will probably spend about five seconds on your website before bouncing off to the next blog on his list.

In one sense, your thoughts are correct - but lets try and take a look at this from another angle. You’ve got a whole range of fellow blog owners visiting your website, often every twenty four hours (one drop per twenty four hours). I see a window of opportunity here, especially if your blog is of any direct benefit to fellow blog members.
You have five seconds to capture your fellow blog owners attention - so what are you gunna do?

In my opinion, offering your Entrecard referred traffic some sort of incentive to engage in some sort of activity in your blog is the first step. But before we jump the gun, lets focus on how we’re going to visually capture their attention first.

Setting up a widget next to your Entrecard, in a of bold, eye catching colour, detailing your bid to have these five second readers converted into loyalists, is in my opinion a very sound idea. Better yet, you can insert this text inside the Entrecard widget, therefore placing it in their faces. Seeing as Entrecard allows you to give away credits, running some sort of credit give away in exchange for some sort of involvement would be absolutely ideal - especially as the webmaster is really only on your blog because they’re seeking to up their credit count in a bid to purchase some advertising.

Encouraging these webmasters to contribute a genuine, 10 word comment usually means their going to have to at least skim through one article on your blog - and if worst comes to worst, you’ll still be remembered as the blog that gave them free credits.

I’m very interested to hear how Entrecard is performing for you.. Are you raking in much traffic, whether it be from advertisements you’ve dropped or card drops?