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Have you ever heard the term that if you snooze you will lose? The losers at the end of the line are usually the ones that snoozed from getting in on the business. This exactly matches how life works because even when you were a kid, you probably knew that if you wanted to get a bouncy ball for recess, you would have to get to the line first. You would have to dodge, push, shove, and run all the way to the lady (or guy) that passes out the balls, but if you get to the line a bit too late, you will see yourself ball-less. Same thing happens to adults these days and I’m sure you know what I mean. If you’re trying to open a new business as a adult, you must know there are competition out there. Get to know that if there is competition, you have to make yourself different, but that may fail too. Instead, you must be the first one to come up with something different. If you’re the first, you will end up getting more clients and more business. If you stir up controversy when you’re blogging, you may also stir up a lot of traffic

Be The First

There is so much controversy over the internet and in real life. Controversy just starts out of no where and becomes huge, but you must start the controversy first. For example, I’m going to put John Chow into the picture. Although I’ve made truce with John Chow on my blog post stating that he is a great guy, a lot of people still don’t see it, and there are still controversy stirring around his name. If you were to write up an article about how much you hate John Chow, you won’t be the first. As a matter of fact, I’ve seen so many posts about how this blogger hates John or that blogger thinks John is an ass. It’s basically all the same crap that is being spread around and you know what, John has already given up on trying to argue. Instead, he has taken the bad press into his own hand and turned it around into real blog traffic.

If you’re hoping to stir up controversy, you must think of something that hasn’t been done yet. What I did last week was publish a post stating that I was going to sell my Entrecard account and leave Entrecard for good. Now a lot of bloggers have already stated they would leave Entrecard, but no one has ever stated that the account itself was going to be sold. I took this to my advantage and started an eBay listing, publish an article, and talk about it in the Entrecard forums. The result was that I gained a lot of controversy and traffic. I may not be the first person that stated that I would leave Entrecard, but I was the first to state that I’m selling my account. Being first allowed me to choose what I want to do with the topic.

Gain Backlinks

Now that you have stirred up some sort of controversy, you will bound get some heads turning your way (if done correctly). Depending on how you approach the matter and the situation, a lot of your viewers will turn around and blog about your article post on their blog. Now a link to your blog means a backlink. It may or may not be permanent, but you still receive a backlink for the meantime.

A backlink to your website is basically stating that someone else likes your blog and it results in higher ranks and higher values. If you take a look at your stats on DNScoop, you will be able to tell that backlinks are an essential in raising the value of your blog. I’m not stating that you should sell your blog, but a higher value usually makes a site owner happy . What you should do is keep weekly checks on your stats and you would notice that if your backlinks raise or lower, it affects the value a lot.

Another thing that backlinks raise is your Technorati Authority. The Authority decides your ranking in the Technorati system. Bloggin-Ads is currently one of the Top 10,000 blogs with an authority of 533+. What that provides is more money to me because advertisers would want those type of stats. It took me 7 months to gain this rank, but I’ve been trying to gain backlinks everywhere for this

The Haters

Stirring up controversy could ruin your image to some of your viewers or newer visitors, but it’s your choice on doing it. There are always haters in the world because not everyone has the same taste of how things run . I was surprised at how many bloggers from Entrecard came out of the dust to leave a comment on my post just bashing on me and my decision.

Evilwoobie (here’s some love for ya ) even said that my blog is like a directory for A-listers now and I do admit that it looks like it. I haven’t done much reviews as promised either because if you do a lot of blog reviews, you will realize that all the blogs are the same.

Off Topic: I’m looking for unique blogs and it doesn’t even matter what size, as long as the content provided is different. From what I’m seeing through my requests, I’m getting a lot of requests from bloggers that use Entrecard (probably because I’m a member too). Most of these blogs are about money making or Entrecard. Once in a while I would see something different in the community, but for those, I haven’t gotten the chance to review yet (they definitely will). I do apologize that I haven’t replied to bloggers that sent me a request, but I do have it written down for a possible review.

As you can see, just by trying to stir up some controversy, I received hate comments that aren’t even related to the topic itself. You’re bound to get these type of comments, but you have to also learn to take all this bad press in just like how John Chow does. Don’t try to make enemies, but instead turn it around and understand the comment. EvilWoobie left me a bashing comment, but I’m not trying to make enemies with anyone, so I understand what she is trying to tell me. Depending on how you approach things, you may or may not make friends with your enemies

Entrecard Is Great

Less clicks on bigger sites because they don’t focus on Entrecard. If they’re not participating much in the community, they won’t see much traffic from Entrecard. If they were to drop cards daily (about 100-200), they would see a lot more entrecard members viewing their blog. This results in more clicks to the member advertising on the widget displayed on their blog. The only problem there is you are probably only getting about 30-50 clicks from John Chow or 10-30 clicks from John Cow. This is because the visitors to their blog is completely unrelated to Entrecard. The traffic that they get is what YOU want rather than the same visitors on and on. Yes a lot of you hate me for stating that the Entrecard traffic is “fake”, but you have to look at the big picture to realize it. You’ll get traffic, but you won’t get traffic from the real bloggers (blogs with unique content) out in the blogosphere. I admit that some of you guys have extraordinary blogs with great unique content, but most of you guys just talk about Entrecard or talk about stuff that are already being discussed on 50 other blogs. I talk about Entrecard too, but I bring up a different type of content and controversy.

Point is, if you don’t participate in Entrecard by dropping cards or chatting in the forums, you will probably not receive as much clicks and you probably won’t give out as much either. Unless you’re a well known person around all of the blogosphere or if you’re a moderator/staff of Entrecard, you would probably see yourself as the lower part of the Entrecard community. And the final point will be if you wish to just make a community of friends, you can continue to use Entrecard forever. If you wish to grow your blog, you can start with Entrecard, but eventually moving on. You will limit yourself if you stay in one community when there are so much more out there in the blogosphere. You can most definitely try to use Entrecard and grow at the same time, but a lot of big bloggers are actually disgusted by seeing the Entrecard widget (I won’t say any names, but this is a fact). The proper way to get your blog out would actually be to connect with other communities outside of Entrecard, which I’ve been doing while other bloggers have been using Entrecard. I have built up bigger networks in social media sites like Twitter, MyBlogLog, and BlogCatalog. You must be able to gain the visit of those visitors that are going to John Chow’s blog (example) because they’re the ones that are not clicking on your advertisement image on the widget. They’re the ones that probably don’t know or have ever seen your blog. Some of you may have tried to get your blog out previous to Entrecard launching, but failed. Entrecard just makes things a lot easier to start out first We love you Graham!

Lesson Learned (RANT section )

You can’t depend on Entrecard for everything. While others will building traffic and popularity with Entrecard, I gone ahead and built a bigger network elsewhere. Participation in the other communities allowed me to gain a higher popularity in the blogosphere itself rather than lock myself in one. But I still love Entrecard because it’s one of the networks that is helping me gain popularity, so getting rid of it would be out of the question. I know I’m not getting the traffic that the popular blogs on Entrecard are getting, but overall through the whole blogosphere, I am ranked higher. If you’re looking towards being a successful blogger or a money maker, ranking high in the whole picture would be better than a portion of it.

Now you should understand what I mean by “fake traffic” when I related it to Entrecard because you’re getting the same drops and clicks from the same people on Entrecard. This is another reason why your bounce rate goes higher. I would die for 100-300 clicks on my advertisement image on John Chow because the traffic would be considered organic and they’ll be new blood. The traffic that John Chow and John Cow receives is indeed not fake because if you purchased a review, you would see that a spike occurs in your Alexa rank (maybe not as much anymore due to the new Alexa system). What I mean by “fake traffic” is just traffic that is the same and coming from the same people, but some of you took it into assumption that it meant otherwise. I wasn’t specific with my “Goodbye To Entrecard” post because I wanted to see the reactions from peoploe agreeing with me and disagreeing. I have gained a lot of new readers from this, but have also lost visitors. I gained a lot of traffic and some linkbacks from all this mayhem and controversy I’ve created .

Sorry for the experiment, but I wanted to try something out after I noticed how the guy on Twitter tried to sell his account on eBay, but canceled all the bids in the end. In return, he gain huge publicity. By the way, the eBay auction I left up was legitimate, but I have contacted the buyer to work out an mutual agreement because I forgot to close the auction. LOL.

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