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Kontera is an advertising program that I wanted to test run on my blog. It is the double underlined words that you see after the entire site loads. I started using them on November 7th, and so far I have only made about $2 from them. Now obviously, with the growth rate of the blog, I will eventually be making a decent income from them, but I do not know if the extra $10-50/m is worth annoying my visitors, and adding a little extra delay in the blog loading.

It is up to you, comment below if you think the Kontera ads take too long to load, are annoying, and if you think I should get rid of them. If the majority agrees with me and wants me to get rid of Kontera, I will take them down for a few months, but I may ultimately try them again later when they are more relevant, pay more, load faster, and are less annoying to the visitors.

A lot of people were asking me for information regarding how much traffic John Chow sent rssHugger.com when I ordered a blog review, so I have decided to make a public post about it. For those who do not know the background, the first review was quite negative (because my site charged money to join), but after I changed the site’s business model, John Chow made an updated post about the new features and the site received a lot more publicity and many blogs did their own reviews about it.

My blogs launch was featured on Mashable.com (9th largest blog in the world), as well as KillerStartups (4000 RSS readers), but even combining those two together did not equal the amount of traffic and viral marketing that I received from John Chow.

*Picture edited to fit in frame* This traffic spike is known as the “John Chow Effect”
As shown above, the press on John Chow sent a lot of visitors to the website, much more than a bigger blog reviewing the website. Although Mashable covered the launch for free, I would still consider a review on John Chow a worthy investment if you have a great product for bloggers, readers, or webmasters looking to make money online.  The numbers here will gradually increase as I am still on page two of John Chow’s blog, but these numbers represent a close estimate to the full extent of a John Chow review.

My reviews:
http://www.johnchow.com/rsshugger-wants-to-share-a-little-love/
http://www.johnchow.com/rsshugger-giving-out-free-hugs/

Today I have signed up for Entrecard after getting an email from the CEO, Graham Langdon. Entrecard is the square widget (the 125×125 button on the top right of my blog [or at the bottom of this post]) that is like a virtual business card. webmasters can install them on their blog, and then when you visit another website using Entrecard, you can “drop your card” much like you would in real life meeting a new business acquaintance. Every time you drop your Entrecard on another blog, or every time someone drops one on yours, you earn a credit. Credits can then be cashed out by advertising you 125×125 button on other websites running the widget. I have installed Entrecard to give it an official case study to see how well you can network with other bloggers, and how well the advertising system works. I want to see if the idea actually benefits everyone, or if the theory is only good on paper (Communism anyone?).

The Pros:
• Free and easy to use
• Has cool analytics/graphs
• No annoying emails
• Big bloggers are testing the waters with it
• Pretty much unique
• Has the potential to benefit the little guys, as well as the big guys

The Cons:
• The widget looks ugly
• A lot of bloggers have ugly buttons
• The system is easily abused
• Big time blogs may get overrun with advertisers and disable the widget (Shoemoney)
• Lots of blogs drop their cards to earn credits, has little “networking” in it.
• The “categories” page provides little benefit to the newer blogs.
• The “categories” page provides little benefit to the blogs “below the fold”
• The “categories” page has a few widgets that are repeated for 5 block.

The case study: I will be running Entrecard and dropping cards over the next month or so, and if Entrecard can help increase website traffic, I will continue using it. My goal is to get one new reader for every reader that I refer to Entrecard. If I can get 25 readers who have not visited my blog before, to subscribe to the rss, then I will gladly promote Entrecard in return. The site looks like it has potential, after they fix a few kinks (Every site has kinks, I have no doubt the final product will fix a lot of issues). If you want to join the case study with me, feel free to join Entrecard, otherwise you can wait a month until I will lay down my update on whether or not it helps increase website traffic. I hope Entrecard works how Graham intended, and benefits everyone!

Feel free to drop me your card:

This is the 12th part of The Link Building Cookbook series showing you the best places to build links to increase website traffic.

A great way to build backlinks is from related blogs. The problem that most people run into is the blogs do not have a “Top Commentators” plugin, or do not have search engine friendly blog comments. I have run across a blog search engine that lists only blogs that have dofollow enabled. So far, the list is pretty small, but I feel it has potential and should not be overlooked. The site is called CommentHunt.com.

The site brings up a lot of duplicate entries, so if one blog gets accepted EVERY single post shows up in the search engine. This is nice for if you want to build a lot of links, but if you search for something generic like “internet marketing”, you will get half of the results from one single blog. A lot of the blogs have disabled followed links as well, so be sure to watch out for those, or you can always report them. All in all, it is a decent link building tool, but since it is completely free, I cannot complain much about it. If it is something you like, use it, otherwise move onto the rest of the goodies that The Link Building Cookbook has to offer.