In a previous article I mentioned some of the most popular niches among Entrecard users. However, this time I’d like to bring to your attention another aspect of the Entrecard community: something that all users have in common.

I know that trying to analyse thousands of people as a whole may be complicated. Anyone slightly familiar with Internet marketing concepts knows that we should preferably target niches. Still, I insist: despite the several divisions, niches and subniches that you can identify on the Entrecard directory, there is one way to address the entire community’s need at once.

All Entrecard users want traffic

Regardless of niche and personal preferences, what all Entrecarders want is traffic, above all else. It doesn’t matter what they want this traffic for. It may be for money making purposes, or for fame, or just to find more people to exchange views… Whatever they want, doesn’t change the fact that traffic is the way to achieve it.

Entrecard is such a successful site exactly because it meets its users’ expectations. Moreover, it’s reliable, unlike many other suspicious traffic generating offers that you may find all over the Internet.

What can you do about this simple lesson?

1. Use this as a model when you need to analyze large groups of consumers. See what needs they have in common. While smaller groups are easier to understand, it’s always possible to look at the big picture.

2. Leverage Entrecard’s userbase. One site that has been successfully doing it is BlogEngage. It would have taken me much longer to find this site if it wasn’t for all the Entrecard spots that it buys on several blogs. And note that BlogEngage is also another traffic generating site. It’s a perfect match for Entrecarders.

3. Create your own traffic generating service. There are thousands of webmasters and bloggers out there waiting for good promotional tools. Entrecard does have some competitors, but none of them has managed to become as popular. Can you take this challenge and create a better solution?

I have more Entrecard-related tips to share with you. Subscribe to The WebMaster Blog so you don’t miss any future post. And remember that by subscribing you’ll have the chance to win several prizes in our contest. Click here to learn more about it.

Apparently this question is very easy to answer. Anyone can go to Entrecard, click on “Browse” and verify the amount of blogs listed on each category. However, the definitive answer may be a bit less obvious than expected.

In absolute numbers, the “Personal Diary” category is the most popular one, containing more than a thousand listings. But if you do the math, you’ll notice that “Internet Marketing” has even more listings. It’s just that they are divided among other related categories, i. e., “Make Money Online,” “Blogging Resources,” “Marketing,” “Business” etc. Sum all their listings and you’ll get over 2,500 blogs as a result.

This was to be expected, after all. Internet marketers are ever looking for easier ways to play the traffic game. And we all agree that the Entrecard system is truly helpful when it comes to increasing pageviews (if said pageviews will lead to conversions or not, is another topic). So, if you’d like to network with other marketers, Entrecard could be a very good starting point.

Nonetheless, this article is mainly meant to draw your attention to the “hidden” niches inside Entrecard.

Let’s get back to the aforementioned personal diaries. Besides forming the largest list within the Entrecard directory, they are also present in many other categories — yes, including the marketing-related ones. For instance, take a look at the Lifestyle listings. Visit some blogs. Aren’t most of them personal diaries? Now repeat this little test with other categories, like “Pets,” “Art,” “Philosophy,” “Mixed Bag,” “Parenting & Family,” “Hobbies”… You’ll find many other personal blogs. Some of them are partially disguised as niche blogs, but several aren’t.

You may also notice that many of those personal blogs contain posts about pets and/or crafts. This only goes to show that such topics are much more popular among the Entrecard crowd than they appear to be at first sight. And to think that the Entrecard directory currently contains less than 200 entries in the Pets category… Talk about misleading data!

I would write about the conclusions that one could draw from the pieces of info above. But I’ll do something better: I’ll leave it to you. You tell me what you have concluded and how you could put your knowledge to good use. The comment form is open to you.

While I wait for your input on this subject, I’ll prepare more articles on Entrecard — and several of them will be directly or indirectly derived from what I’ve learned by studying the Entrecard directory. Click here to subscribe to our blog and you’ll be able to read the next posts as soon as they’re released.

When you start a blog, you’re incredibly excited and you start to really cram out the content. I can remember when I started my first blog, I had time stamped about four articles and I was writing more and more. The first few articles were published and I waited…waited…waited…And no traffic came. So I tried some more articles and I waited…The same thing happened. Now, when I started this blog, I was brand new in blogging. Since then, though, I have determined what my problem was: no one could find me.

But, not only could people not find me, search engines could not find me. When you’re running any kind of website, whether it is a forum, blog, or content site, you want the search engines to find you. They bring the traffic that is going to click ads and sign up for affiliate offers far more than any other kind of lead to your site. I realized this and went in search of some information to try and increase my ‘findability.’ I realized that I needed to build links to get people to my blog. However, I also needed to use the right keywords.

What I pieced together was a series of steps that I felt would increase my ‘findability.’ They’re not full proof as nothing in this world is, but they are an effective method in increasing the number of backlinks you receive as well as increasing your keyword rankings in the search engines. Take from this list as you please. However, here are some methods to increase both:

• Join a couple of forums in your niche and put a link to your blog in your signature. However, not only are you going to put the link in your signature, you’re going to use the anchor text (keywords) that you want to rank for on the search engines.

• When you write a blog post that is really good, send an e-mail to the authorities in your niche and let them know that you wrote it. Sometimes, they are looking for ideas and they’ll link back to you for giving them an idea.

• Another thing to do when you write an awesome post is submit it to an authority blog in your niche for a guest blog post. By doing this, you’re getting on their blog, but you’re using the keyword YOU want rather than the one that they think you may want.

• Comment a minimum of ten times a day on different blogs. I found that if I commented on different blogs at least ten times a day, I would start to become a part of the communities and people would know who I was.

• Consider holding a contest. By holding a contest, you’re going to determine how they can win. If you’re link building, tell them that to be entered in the contest, they need to link to you with the keyword you want. My advice, though, is to have a couple of keywords rather than one.

• Finally…Consider having a budget and going out to purchase some links. If you purchase the right links, you can really get the ‘findability’ that you want as well as the ranking in the search engines. But, do it the right way else suffer the great Google Ban!

The trick to getting good backlinks and strong keywords is to be in control. Pick a few keywords that you want to rank for. Also, don’t JUST link to your homepage. If you wrote a very cool article, link to that article with a very specific (or not so specific) keyword. By doing this, you’ll get traffic to individual blog posts and not just the main blog.

All in all, what you want to do is make it so people and search engines can find you. By using the above steps, what you are guaranteeing is that you are increasing your backlinks and, on top of that, making sure that the keywords you rank for in the search engines are the ones that you want to maximize traffic. By doing this, you’re going to really increase your exposure to the blogosphere. Try it out…See what happens.

Jacob is an avid guitar player as well as a biology major in college with hopes of becoming a professor. When not blogging on The Webmaster Blog, he is over at his political opinion blog.