Question by Terrah’s Dawn :

What do you know about Traffic Exchanges like Dragon Surf, Surf4theEarth, Traffic-Crypts etc… I’m trying them out now. I can’t seem to get useful info on how to make real money with them. Some claim up to $200 a day with this stuff. Just wondering if you know anything about them. Thanx again Mr. Javo for another great blog. (yes I’m a subscriber)

Ok Terrah, that’s a good question about blogging. Over the web there is a lot of programs to exchange traffic, I mean that with those programs you can get traffic to your website for free, but how them works?

Programs like EasyHits4You, Surf4TheEarh, DragonSurf, LinkReferral…brings you unique visitors daily because they all use a ranking system. This system is basically an “slave measurer” and I say “slave” because in these programs, to be ranked higher you need to -for example- visit 30 sites daily, review 5 of them and add 2 to your favorites. So by doing this everyday you get ranked in the top, bringing you the most of traffic to your website….but imagine to do that everyday with 5 exchange traffic programs?

It Worth?? I don’t think so.

In addition, I think that all those “visits” doesn’t worth. To be ranked higher, the people visit your site for 20 sec or something like that…That people who visit your blog does it for the ranking and not to meet new sites. To verify this, check in your site statistics for the pageview time of those sites and you will see that this time is not longer than 1 minute.

But however, all those program find the way to attract more users by paying them for referring people or visiting websites. That’s how they keep their users visiting over and over again the same websites. That’s like a vicious circle, once you enter you can’t leave it then!

My Personal Recommendation

When I managed the blogspot blog, I used like 1 month one of those programs. It provided me like 80 visits per day and I was wonder for that, when I began to use that program I simply love it, but then I start to check the statistics….When I saw the pageview time from that site, I leave it instantly!! really it doesn’t worth, by joining to those kind of programs you will be an slave for a time after you noticed that it doesn’t worth and you will end leaving it…

Yesterday I received an email from BlogCatalog notifying me about a new idea that they had. What would you happen if your newest post was Dugg and all your friends at BlogCatalog knew about it? And then what would happen if they Dugg it too, letting all of their friends know it. That would be pretty powerful, right?

Well in the next couple of days, BlogCatalog will launch Social Dashboard beta, a new feature that displays your latest activities across many social networks — Digg, Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, YouTube, and many others . That means automatic cross-networking and promotion right from your personal profile page. It also means that the your post updates, Twitter comments, Digg submissions, and other activities will appear on the Social Dashboard of all your BlogCatalog friends, and maybe their friends too. This is the kind of networking that can make posts go viral. And that’s just for starters.

Their Dashboard will help you keep up on the activities of your friends. It’s almost like having the ultimate social network feed reader made up of your friends, it’s absolutely awesome don’t you think?? It will help you streamline networking and stay up to date with friends across the Web. When they upload a new Flickr photo or submit a new article to Digg, you will know and you can then share it with your friends.

Use it promote your activities. Use it to keep up on friends.

They also think Social Dashboard will strengthen the BlogCatalog community for you. It helps make profile pages much more dynamic, giving people a reason to visit them again and again. I was waiting something like this since too many time ago, now we can share all our network links across the web in a single place  :twisted: .

Some days ago I was talking with Mark from 45n5.com and he invite me to check him new project called Showyouadhere. I visited the site and the first I notice was the professionalism, it’s very simple but dynamic.

What will you find by joining to this program ?

Ok Showyouradhere is a service to buy and sell banners, I really like the platform and how is it presented.As you can see in the image beside this text, you can place in your blog/site all the kind of banners with multiple sizes:

Horizontal, Vertical and Square. In addition, you can place widgets:

The superior widget its “125x125RecentVisitors” and as you can see, with it you can earn money by showing a banner at the same time you are showing your visitors from this community, sexy hug?

The other widget it’s called “125x125Blogroll” and you can show an 125×125 ad in addition of a list with your favorite blogs. Noticed that you can only show 6 links, but what if you have more links?? don’t worry about that because you can show up to 6 blogs chosen randomly from your blogroll list.

All the payments are made with paypal, and you can buy a spot for 7, 14, 21 or 28 days, you don’t need to pay the complete month if you don’t want it.

Affiliate Program

Ok the problem is that there are too many publishers and few advertisers. Mark found the solution for that, with the affiliate program you will earn 10% of your affiliated advertisers! yes, if you refer an advertiser you will get 10% of what he spend, this mean that if he earn $10 you will earn $1, imagine if you refer an advertiser and he spend $1000 per month on ads, you will earn $100 per month!

Sign up to ShowYourAdHere right now!

Everybody in the blogsphere talk about backlinks, and may be you can’t understand what are they talking about, but really the meaning of backlink is very simple. A backlink is an incoming link to a website, is any link received by a web page, directory, website, blogs etc etc… from another website. The Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

How are they useful to my website?

 

The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of your blog or website. While more backlinks you have, more higher will be your popularity and ranking on search engines. A backlink represent like your signature, getting backlinks for everywhere means like if you were in all those sites, imagine what would you think if you visit 30 sites and you see my banner or link for example, you probably will think “this guy is everywhere, he’s popular!”

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the factors for determining that website’s search engine ranking. For example, Google’s PageRank algorithm uses backlinks to help determine a site’s rank. Therefore, websites often employ various techniques called search engine optimization to increase the number of backlinks pointing to their website.

Due to the abuse of using paid links to improve Google partially updated their Page Rank Tool to pin against paid links providers and the forward link of sites. This action resulted in a significant decrease in Page Rank of many websites worldwide. However although many believe that Google penalizes people for having unrelated backlinks to their blogs/websites, this has never been confirmed.

Some techniques to gain Backlinks

There are many paths to consider when building links to your site or blog such as link baiting or blogroll link swapping. There are many techniques to get backlinks but I will provide you only the most commons.

• Submitting your blog in web directories and social networks: This is a good way to get some backlinks, submitting your blog in social networks, also in directories like BlogCatalog or Blogarama. You should search for directory sites that are indexed deep (with too many backlinks), directories that are specific to your niche/category and directories where your category is not too crowded (almost impossible). There is a list of 20 essential blog directories to submit your blog.
• Commenting on Dofollow blogs: Dofollow blogs are blogs that give you a backlink just for commenting at them, doing this you will start to generate backlinks to your site as you have no idea, but don’t be a spammer!. If you don’t know what’s Dofollow, please check my guest post on JoeTech.
• Exchanging links with other blogger: this is very common, you can see in the most of blogs a blogroll section. Try to visit and comment frequently in a blog and after some weeks, you could contact the blogger and ask for a link exchange.
• Buying Text Links or Banners: plus text links, the banners also provide you a backlink. Before to buy, try to do an exchange…

My ideas disappeared ! if you find another way to generate backlinks please comment it in this post!!

Backlink Tools

• BackLinkWatch: this website is able to track every backlink to your site.
• BackLinkSpot: this website can provide you blogs and websites with dofollow attributes, letting you to find where you can drop your link to drink some of the juice of search engines backlinks.
• Technorati: with technorati you can track your backlinks!, they call them “reactions“. Following them, you will find the blogs which drop a backlink to you.

As you could notice, is very important for every website or blog to get backlinks. This way you will improve your rank on search engines and attract more traffic to your web, attracting the people attention .

As I promised you, today I did the contest draw… Thanks for all who participated in the contest, I will make another contest the next week so don’t disappoint if you didn’t win this time….

I don’t told you but I will write entrecard recommendations for the first 10 winners , so here is the table of the ten first winners:

And the winner of 1000 E-Credits is Marcus from Daily Deals Blog, congratulations!! I already sent your credits to your mail.

For all the participants listed above, please sent me your entrecard profile link to write the recommendation . See you in the next contest.

Hello! I want to thank to everybody who participated in my second Entrecard Contest. I got many participants this time, I doubled the number of participants of the first contest.

This is the list of participants who joined to the contest, if someone joined and isn’t listed please leave a comment and I’ll check your entry:

1. masterofseo ~ 6 entries.
2. Marcus ~ 16 entries.
3. Iankapo ~ 5 entries.
4. gasofmoney ~ 16 entries.
5. CM ~ 2 entries.
6. Rome ~ 14 entries.
7. A. Caleb Hartley ~ 2 entries.
8. Clint Lenard ~ 2 entries.
9. ContestHub ~6 entries.
10. Bylla ~ 11 entries.
11. Ninja Steve ~ 2 entries.
12. Peter ~ 11 entries.
13. Daveboy ~ 5 entries.
14. Fadly ~ 6 entries.
15. BunGirl ~ 6 entries.
16. filipinobloggers.com ~ 6 entries.
17. Indocontest ~ 5 entries.
18. Indoconsoles ~ 10 entries.
19. Queenie ~ 11 entries.
20. Terrah Dawn ~ 6 entries.
21. Zander Chance ~ 8 entries.
22. Kim ~ 5 entries.
23. Diana13 ~ 7 entries.
24. Rob Diana ~ 6 entries.
25. Carol ~ 16 entries.
26. Cynthia Nichols ~ 3 entries.
27. Tish ~ 3 entries.
28. betshopboy ~ 5 entries.
29. Contests+Money ~ 11 entries.
30. Wyndell ~ 11 entries.
31. Blogging Income Project ~ 6 entries.
32. Nishadha ~ 2 entries.

I will be the draw tomorrow with the random.org service . Good luck for everyone!