A couple of days ago, I read a very good article on how to bring in traffic to our blogs. I know that I need such guidance and one of the tips given is to participate in traffic exchanging services.

Firstly, I am not sure if this will work and even if it does, will it be considered as traffic manipulation? My concern is getting sustainable traffic and not from participants in traffic exchanges whose only concern is to chalk up credit.

Talking about traffic, I remember once I had to fill out a form and answer a question like this:

Q: Which of your blog post received the highest traffic? What did you write about?

I did not know what to reply. I can’t tell them that my top posts were on fried sperm and c-string gua ….. lol

Building a blog is not difficult but building traffic and readership is!

I am not sure if I am the only one with this problem. I believe you know that I have this major issue with being spammed to death and if I were to leave my Spam folder alone for one day, I would have more than a thousand spam comments waiting for me.

The problem is that real, legitimate comments are sometimes caught by Akismet too which is not so much as a problem except that I would have to go through the folder every single day to make sure that all comments in there are nothing that I would like to keep.

I have tried to De-Spam time and again but I do find these same people being caught again and again. This could get pretty annoying, don’t you think so? I wonder if this is a bug that only I am experiencing because I don’t see anyone complaining also….

Just an hour ago, RealRank has been rolled out by Triple P. So far, my ranks are shown as N/A. I am not sure if it will take a little time to populate the ranks and how long it will take because I am not seeing any changes in the number of opps available to me. I know that it will also take time to change the mindset of advertisers.

But then maybe N/A IS my RealRank? I don’t know, I would have to drop by the forum later in the morning. It’s freaking 5.10am over here and I would not be able to absorb whatever I have read in the forum right now, anyway. A few hours won’t make a difference.

Will RealRank replace G**gle PageRank in the near future? That, we shall have to see!

I suddenly have so much free time on my hands lately that I have spent good time networking and bringing in more traffic despite it all. I still haven’t join Facebook, though. I need to work on getting traffic from there and also Stumble Upon. Yeah… hopefully somebody will Stumble me because I am too straight to Stumble my own posts haha!

Also, this morning, somebody found me through Technorati for the keyword Entrecard and came over, wanting to drop me card but then there is no widget on this blog since Entrecard currently does not support multiple blogs and widgets in a single account and I am not going to set up many accounts just to submit my blogs to the site but it is a great traffic generator.

So while I have been complaining that I do not have the time to network, this is an opportunity for us to network and work on traffic and build a larger readership.

I was blog hopping when I came across the link to check our RealRank. I know that it has been open to some beta testers but I am not one of the testers and I did not check the forum because frankly, PPP is not as relevant to me as it was six to twelve months ago.

Anyway, I went to check out a few of my blogs and I am not surprised with the low ranks. I know I haven’t been networking because I am basically an introvert. I could write and have no one reading and I would be just as happy but then I would feel bad for my sponsors hence I do try to get the blog out a little now and then.

You may wonder why I questioned if RealRank is flawed. I have read many people saying that page ranks, Alexa, Technorati ranks and what-have-you could be easily manipulated. So can traffic.

The thing is, I checked a few of my blogs and I found that the blog that received the most traffic and page views daily on the average and has a link weight that is heavier than all the rest has a low Rank. Well, that is not a problem because maybe the scale is high for RealRank and my site is really that lowly ranked.

The problem is that when I checked my new blog, only two months old and do not even have twenty posts in it, no traffic at all unless I publish a post, not linked to except for two kind friends who included me on their blogroll, unclaimed on Technorati, do not have any Page Rank history yet and an Alexa reading exceeding a million because it is so new, has a way higher RealRank than any of my more established blogs.

I don’t know about you, but this certainly looks screwed up!

Well, people have been saying that our sites are getting smacked selectively. I have to agree. I know of many other sites with blatant advertisements or call it whatever you like and yet their ranks are not tanked. The problem with this issue is that bloggers have been linking out to anything and everything for years but just because some are given a little compensation to pay for the hosting and upkeep of their blogs, they are smacked. Heck, I have a blog that I link out to websites in every single posts and I did not get any compensation at all but I still link out just because I like and want to. Why is this a problem NOW?

Today, I decided to reveal this screen shot that I took from my stats tracker. I discovered this visitor from Georgia, Carollton, USA visiting all my ‘working’ blogs persistently a few times a day almost every day since July or August this year.

I remember mentioning it to my friend and told him that this is not a good sign and he told me that I am being paranoid. No, I am not! I labelled the IP as “SPY” and he or she truly is! You can see for yourself! This is why I have been keeping a low profile all these while. Maybe it’s not low enough!

As an update on my post on Entrecard a week ago, I finally found the time to register my blog last night. Yea, see, I am so free now /sarcasm GGrrr

Anyway, registration is very simple and I think every blog will be accepted by default until they are manually reviewed. Blogs must be in English with fairly good content, not offensive, racialistic and bla bla bla the usual negatives.

I placed the widget on my blog and went visiting to other members but I could not find anywhere to “drop my card”. I did however, receive cards that were dropped to me and also “advertisement” Yay.. happy, happy!

Because I am a new member, my credit is low. I think it’s a 2:1 ratio on the rate of dropping a card and receiving one. In the morning though, once again I visited all the blogs and this time, I could find the “drop my card” link. I think it took a little while for the widgets to recognise me as an Entrecard holder or something.

So off I went visiting blog after blog and dropped my card. With the cards I dropped, collected and also advertisements bought from my blog, I have more than 100 points already. Happy!

Like I said, this is a great way to get your blog out. I have many visitors from my participation in Entrecard 😀

It would be great if we could register different blogs on Entrecard on different categories and different images and respective widgets like how we could do it on Fuel My Blog. Graham Langdon, the CEO, personally replied my email on Sunday (impressive) that they will be working on it but it will take a little while.

I think that the earlier we participate the better because we will have more chances to collect credits plus it will be cheaper to advertise on big name blogs.

ETA: I would also love it if there’s some way for us to see which blogs were newly added to the system, so that we could visit to drop our cards.