I go to a lot of websites on a daily basis and many times see the RSS subscriber count. This can be an extremely beneficial thing because it shows newcomers to your site just how many other people think you are pretty good at what you do. Having a high subscriber number automatically give the site a degree of credibility.

However… For most sites, the count is at somewhere between 0 and 10. Why are you advertising this? It doesn’t benefit you to openly say that no one reads your site on a regular basis. When I go to a site that has 3 subscribers, how much am I going to trust the site?

Don’t get me wrong, this site is still new and I only have right now but there is no way that I am going to permanently put that on my homepage until I have at least 50. Until I have about 50, I believe that putting the count on this site would do way more harm than good.

I never would have thought that I would have done a thing like this but I have, I watched something that was featured on Oprah (gasp!!). I opened my mind to the fact that other people might just know something that I don’t.

I watched The Secret and am in the process of reading (well, if listening to it counts) the book. Now if you know what the book/movie is about you will know the great power of the law of attraction but what really got me was that I knew all of the principals in the book/movie and actually got goosebumps while watching the movie! I have always known that if you think about what you want, you will get it. I have personal experiences in my life of this. I’m not going to get into the specifics because they sound a little to pompous for my liking but the law of attraction is how I got both my car and truck, and also how I have been hired at any job I have ever had.

I know how crazy it sounds to think something into existence (it still sounds crazy to me, even though I have seen the product of it) but if you actually take the principal to heart you will see results. All you have to do is think about what you want and that is what you will get. If you you think about what you don’t want, that is also what you will get (even if you are thinking about what you don’t want in a positive way, i.e. “I want to get out of debt”).

This is the principal behind this website as well. I simply know that this website will be a gateway to making money for me, whether the money comes from ads on the site or through something else, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that I can and will be able to make $15/hour 24/7 within a year. I basically expect that I will be wildly successful and therefore have started to believe it.

There are many names for The Secret; Law of attraction, autosuggestion, positive thinking, or just expecting things to happen, but they all have the same basic idea, that what you think about is what you will receive.

I strongly recommend watching the movie, reading the book, or better yet, both. If you don’t know about The Secret the principals of it will change you life (if you let them) for the better and if you do know what The Secret is all about, this will just reconfirm how powerful The Secret really is.

DISCLAIMER: I am not affiliated with anything to do with The Secret and do not, by any means, 100% blind faith believe everything in the book/movie. There are quite a few things that are a little too nutty for me to believe but for the most part I do believe in the principals (especially because I have seen examples in my own life) and have put into practice some of the things suggested in The Secret that I didn’t know.

Last night I was doing a little power dropping of Entrecards and I realized something. Power dropping is not going to have anything to do with making money online or helping others to do the same. I’m not going to lie, I felt a little defeated when this thought came to me because Entrecard is pretty much the main source of traffic for me right now and when I power drop I get many visitors in return.

I realized that there are other forces at work in making a successful blog, and Entrecard has little or nothing to do with it. I mean seriously, how many Entrecards do you think Darren Rowse or Jeremy Schoemaker drop per day for the sole purpose of dropping cards?

Basically the only thing Entrecard does is maybe let you find a few decent blog posts along the way that you write a half hearted comment because you want more backlinks are really interested in the subject, and make you think that you are accomplishing something by dropping cards and buying ads with their credits.

If I don’t drop cards my traffic goes to hell but all of a sudden I get flooded when I drop a couple of cards. This either tells me that Entrecard is crap or that I am crap, and as much as I would like to think that I am the problem (I know it’s my problem that I don’t get traffic overall BTW) I would have to say that Entrecard is basically a useless service. Entrecard has generated nothing but traffic that is here for the sole purpose of dropping a card.

Some say that any traffic is good traffic but I would say that there is a limit to that. If I look at the traffic that comes from Entrecard, There is a bounce rate of almost 100% and roughly 0.00 seconds spent on my site.

Entrecard is both a waste of time and brain power, I wish I could get back the time I have spent on it because it has served me basically no good and my time would have been much better spent doing anything else.

PS. I would imagine that this goes for other Entrecardish sites like Spottt but I haven’t tried any others so I can’t say for sure.

I hate the word niche because ever since I started looking to make money on the internet, this little word has followed me wherever I look. According to Dictionary.com niche means:

1. an ornamental recess in a wall or the like, usually semicircular in plan and arched, as for a statue or other decorative object.
2. a place or position suitable or appropriate for a person or thing: to find one’s niche in the business world.
3. a distinct segment of a market.
4. Ecology. the position or function of an organism in a community of plants and animals.
Adjective
5. pertaining to or intended for a market niche; having specific appeal: niche advertising.
Verb (used with object)
6. to place (something) in a niche.

Obviously in the case of business and making money 2, 3, and 5 are the ones that make sense but you are always given the impression that a “niche” is something very small and very defined. I have come to realize that a “niche” is just fancy speak for what area of the market you work in. This does not have to mean something that says that you only sell the minute hands for watches, what people mean by “find your niche” is just that you have to pursue something. You can’t go after everything, so choose something (doesn’t matter what) and go after it.

If I were to start writing on this site about begonias and the new gardening gloves I just bought, that wouldn’t make sense, but it would if this were a gardening blog.

This isn’t to say that you can’t be in more than one niche, but you have to separate them or you tend to look a little dodgey. Most people who make money on the internet do business in more than one niche but they separate them to get the most out of each one.

I am fairly certain that anyone who has an Entrecard on their website has written some sort of article or post on it. There is nothing that I am going to say that hasn’t been said already but here goes. There is a good and bad to the program:

The good part is that the program drives a huge amount of traffic (relatively, for a site being a month old). More than half of my traffic comes from Entrecard at this point but….

The bad part is that most of that traffic is virtually uninterested in what your blog or site is about and only hits your site to click your card and get credits.

So… is it a good idea or bad idea to put a card on your website? Well, I am not going to take mine off but I would say that you should look at where your traffic is coming from. Look at what your bounce rates are and time spent from a source like Entrecard. The traffic is not quality by any stretch of the imagination but there is a point when traffic, in any form, is good traffic.

With saying that, free traffic like this is actually pretty good for targeting the few quality visitors that you will get. Free traffic is very hit and miss by nature, but Entrecard makes it a little easier to get slightly more targeted traffic by only dropping your card on other blogs that are in your “niche” (I hate that word BTW) and then they will be more likely to drop back on your site and might actually stay for more than just long enough to drop their card.

All in all, the free link exchange idea will get you some sub-par traffic but in the world of websites, traffic is still traffic, and the more, the better.