I was completely wrong, and want to take this time to introduce you to Entrecard “Your Business Card 2.0” and explain why I think it is an absolute amazing service for fellow bloggers.

Entrecard is a business card for your blog. It is an image widget that you place on your site, and other people come by and click the yellow button underneath it that says “Drop.” If you are not signed in, or not yet a member, instead of “Drop,” you will see, “Get one.” Let’s pretend you already have an account, and you’re facing that Drop button. When you click it, it will change to say Thank You, or some other similar message letting you know, you have successfully Dropped your card. What you have done, is handed the owner of that website, your blog’s business card. Then next time they login to Entrecard, they will see in their inbox, an image that you provided of YOUR website. Tada! You’ve just exchanged blog business cards!

My Entrecard Inbox

When you Drop your card by clicking the Drop button, you earn yourself 1EC (1 Entrecard point), and, you also earn that person’s site 1EC. As you gain more and more EC currency, you can then spend it on advertising your site. There is a great eBook that Entrecard provides to new members, so I’ll keep this brief and let them explain the details. But basically, you search for a blog that you think would be a great place to advertise your blog. You may want to aim for readers of a similar or corresponding niche, or, simply one where you can afford the advertising. When you first join, your blog will be very inexpensive to advertise on, so you may get pitches right away. The rates are set by popularity, so your EC cost will go up as others advertise on your site. In case I haven’t been clear, there is no money changing hands here, and everything is 100% free in real world dollars. You can choose to buy EC currency with dollars if you like, but it’s not required, and really not needed. You can set how you will approve advertising (i.e. manually, or automatic) and you can be as picky or free as you like with what appears on your site. When you approve an ad, it will display automatically for a set amount of time and you do not have to do any actual work to make this happen.

An amazingly fun and interesting thing to do, is Drop surf. You can start in the Entrecard dashboard and go to “Campaign” (a button at the top). You choose a category, click an image, and then you will be looking at someone’s profile. From there, you go to their site (be sure to click the Drop button), and then, click the image inside the drop button. You will then be taken on an Entrecard journey and can continue to Drop/Surf your way through some very interesting finds. It’s like StumbleUpon, only better! As you go, you are notifying people of your blog (by leaving them your card), and finding more and more cool blogs to read. If you’d rather stick to your niche, you can do that by way of searching within your Dashboard, but this is a fun way to go blog surfing.

Now, why did I think this was a waste of time? When I first read about Entrecard, I heard about the 300EC daily limit and all the ways people go about to gain as many drops in a day as possible (to increase their “advertising funds”). I didn’t realize this was a Social Networking for Blogs, and just like any other Social Networking club, there are different ways for people to use the service, depending on what they want to accomplish. At a real life social networking event, you will hand your business card to people who will glace at the card, shake your hand, and never look back. You will also find after shaking the hands of twenty people, that you meet some wonderful people you would never have met otherwise! It makes the whole hand shaking, food nibbling event worth every moment. THAT is what Entrecard is about.

As a word of caution, your blog traffic will soar! And your bounce rate will too. My traffic doubled on Dealafina, and the time spent on my site more than cut in half. That’s okay, I understand that most droppers will come to my site to Drop and run. Just keep this in mind – you aren’t doing anything wrong, your content doesn’t suck, you’re just handing out more business cards than you did previously.

If you would like to see my Entrecard in action, you can see it working on my Deal site.

If you use Entrecard, I’d love to hear what you think. If you don’t, do think this sounds interesting to you?

Regardless of WHY you blog, one very important underlying goal that you may not be aware of, is to continue to improve as a blogger. That need is there every time you check your traffic statistics, ask for feedback to a particular post, or consider changing the elements that are present on your blog. In the back of your mind you are wondering if change is good, will it help bring readers, anger loyal readers, deter people from staying long enough to read, or worse yet – will it prevent comments.

It’s important to stay in touch with the vibe of the blogging community, know what people are looking for in a blog, and, how to deliver it.

To stay in the blogging loop, I subscribe to more sites than I can possibly keep up with, but that works to remind me that my goal is never-ending. So instead of a Weekly Review of on goings around the ‘Net from this past week, here are some of the tools from my blogging toolbox.

1. Daily Blog Tips – http://www.dailyblogtips.com/
2. Copyblogger – http://www.copyblogger.com/
3. Personal Branding Blog – http://personalbrandingblog.wordpress.com/
4. ProBlogger – http://www.problogger.net
5. Smashing Magazine – http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
6. ConverStations – http://www.converstations.com/
7. the Blog Herald – http://www.blogherald.com/
8. LifeHacker – http://lifehacker.com/
9. stock.xchng – http://www.sxc.hu/ (free stock photography – just remember to attribute the photographer)
10. Flickr – http://flickr.com/search/advanced/ use the Advanced Search to find pictures with the Creative Commons license so you can use them for free (with attribution to the photographer)

And don’t forget your Blogger Punch List! Just like you need to change your light bulbs, replace batteries, and check your air filters – don’t forget your Blog needs routine maintenance too!

Do you subscribe to your own RSS feed so you see what your feed readers see? Does the “Subscribe Now!” link work? Better yet, pretend to view your site for the very first time – what do you see? Does anything need to change? Can you leave a comment on your latest article? Can a reader contact you?

Create your own punch list and make sure you go through the list on a regular basis.

Image Credits: Pencil Cup by JakeTse and To Do List by Stompy

2. There are 16 preset templates to choose from, including some that have multiple variations bringing the template choice up to 38! This includes only what Blogger provides, but you can find plenty of other templates in a variety of locations. Plus, you can change anything you want with the template, and use a pre-existing one as a skeleton from which to build. Let me explain…

3. Want to change the color scheme of your template without messing with the code? You can point and click your way through a color makeover, and preview your changes as you make them without making any commitments. Easy changes without knowing a lick of HTML!

4. If hands-on code is what you want, you can do that too!  Change how much or how little you like, even change from two columns to three! Click Preview to load the page in a new tab or window so you can see exactly what things will look before saving. Don’t like the changes? No problem – nothing will change until you hit “Save Template.”

The HTML and CSS are together in the same file, so all the code you need to make a fantastic looking site is all there, in one place. If you’re under the impression that you can’t make a great look site with Blogger, take a look at The Blog of Doug Cloud. Doug’s site is a wonderful example of just how much you can customize your Blogger Blog. Go ahead, drool on his site a bit, he won’t mind.

5. Now let’s say you want to add some interactive features to your site. MyBlogLog is a great example.

You can hop on over to MyBlogLog, create an account, and gather the appropriate code to copy/paste into Blogger. Once you have the code copied, head back to your Blogger Dashboard and go to Layout, then Page Elements and click Add a Gadget. Simply choose the HTML/JavaScript gadget and paste the code from MyBlogLog into the Content box and Save. That’s it! No scripts, downloads, or plugins required.

6. Want to add other elements to your Blog? Take a look through the Add a Gadget options as there are plenty from which to choose. You can add Link Lists, Blogrolls, Pictures, RSS feeds, Adsense, HTML/JavaScript (for MyBlogLog, Google Reader, and others), etc. The options are practically endless. Once the item is on your Dashboard you can reposition it with ease, as all the elements on your Dashboard move by way of “Click and Drag.” Below is an example what my Dashboard looks like on a test site (click to see a larger version of the image). The entire page layout is there for you to re-arrange at ease, and allow you to keep the overall site structure in mind.

7. Now that you have your Blog up and running with all the gadgets you could possibly want, you may find yourself bored with your current layout. After all, change can be fun. One quick and easy way to spice up your site is to change your template. One of my favorite resources for Blogger templates is http://www.ourblogtemplates.com/. Their templates look good and work as expected. You can also take a look at http://btemplates.com/ or http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/ or simply search on Google for more Blogger Templates. There are hundreds of free designs to choose from, you just need to go out and find them. You can upload the template directly to your site or create a test blog hidden from everyone but you so you can play around with templates and changes without worries until you know exactly which design you want to use.

8. You can of course do all of your writing directly in Blogger, but you can also use software that may make the job a little easier. Windows Live Writer is what I prefer, and it’s such a fantastic tool, I can’t believe it’s free. The best feature of this software is being able to edit images (add borders, drop shadows, etc.) as you go – no need to switch to a different software application. Windows Live Writer will also upload the pictures along with the post, so all in all, it’s a very handy tool.

9. Automatic Software Updates! This could be a negative depending on your philosophy, but I see it as a positive. Blogger makes updates seamless so you don’t have worry about staying on top of patches and updates.

10. The Blogger community. There are MANY Blogger sites out there, but there are two that stand above the rest. Blogger Buster and Tips for New Bloggers will keep you busy tweaking your site as you continue to learn all the cool and wonderful things you can do with Blogger. These sites are definite “must bookmark/subscribe”. I wish I could highlight all the wonderful things these two sites provide, but there is just too much there and not enough time.

So there you have it. 10 Things You May Not Know About Blogger – in a nutshell.

One requirement to website development is having a non-production site that allows you to test changes without disturbing your “live” site. Although you can’t necessarily do this within your current blog, you can quickly and easily create a test blog that is private! In addition to making private test site, you want to make sure it isn’t being crawled by search engines, listed under your Blogger profile (but still visible to you in your Dashboard), and… well, let’s just say BloggerBuster did a great job of covering this from top to bottom and I highly recommend you take a look if you are planning a site overhaul.

One seemly apparent drawback to Blogger templates (provided by Blogger) is that they are ALL 2 column templates. The truth is, Blogger is so customizable that this isn’t necessarily a problem. You can find different Blogger templates in a variety of places and end up with a very non-Blogger-like site. You can even remove, or rather, hide the “Navbar” (that’s the bar across the top Blogger shows on your site by default) with 5 simple lines of code. I have turned mine on and off but I think I’m going to keep it since it doesn’t seem to interfere with my design.

As far as my personal choice for a template, I really liked the Minima Template for it’s simplicity in design, but wanted it to be 3 columns. I tried downloading versions that other people had created and found that they had tweaked too much and it was less like Minima than I wanted. I was then happy to find amazingly simple instructions on how to convert the template myself! To change Minima from 2 columns to 3, just follow some simple instructions from Tips for New Bloggers.

There are probably hundreds of Blogger resources available, but BloggerBuster and Tips for New Bloggers together truly make up your Swiss Army knife of Blogger goodness. Between the two of them, I have plenty of information to keep me busy improving my site for a long time to come.

1. WordPress.com
a. free hosting available, or the option to host offsite
b. a decent selection of pre-designed templates that are somewhat customizable (via CSS)
c. the ability to edit CSS (NOT the HTML) at a cost of $15 per year

2. Blogger.com
a. free hosting available, or the option to host offsite
b. a decent selection of pre-designed templates that are very customizable
c. the ability to edit anything and everything! There isn’t one piece of your web site that isn’t configurable or customizable.

I spent several days struggling with WordPress, trying to customize a blog so it would have the features that I was looking for, but WordPress really makes this tough. Everything was a challenge. Aside from the limitations, there are quirks made of bad design that just make things overly difficult. Want to have a picture in the sidebar? In WordPress you actually need to begin a blog post, upload the picture, copy the URL it created – and only then can you can add it to the sidebar. To get it from this half-created post, you go back to your Design area, select Widgets, and add a TEXT widget (linking to the URL you just copied). Yes, to add any images to the sidebar, you have to step through several hoops that aren’t logical. Why isn’t there a Media Gallery?

After realizing it was important to me to have the ability to add some javascript widgets from MyBlogLog, I gave up on WordPress entirely. They don’t allow ANY use of Javascript on your site (if you are hosting on their servers). If you host WordPress yourself, you are then able to edit the HTML as well as the CSS, and have a larger selection of templates from which to choose. So I do want to throw that out there (WordPress may actually be useful for some), but, I don’t think the actual interface is any different and that is a big drawback. Their interface could use an entire redesign to make the blogging experience more useful, as well as enjoyable.

Blogger removes a lot of the limitations WordPress imposes, even if you go with hosting on their site. What took about two days in WordPress took me about an hour in Blogger, to reach a point where I was happy and ready to write. The design is user-friendly and logical. Everything works just as it should, and, you can do just about anything. You can even upload other Blogger templates (WordPress does not allow you to upload any other templates than what they provide). Want it your way? Go to Blogger…