I’ve already talked long ago of how awesome I think Entrecard is.  Any free traffic source is great, let alone a free advertising medium as well.  A couple weeks ago, they got even more awesome in my eyes with the launch of their Entrecard Toolbar.

Similar to what SiteHoppin’ was offering, Entrecard has taken it upon themselves to offer a tool to allow EC users to jump from blog to blog within different categories to see what else is out there – and efficiently drop your EC card to receive credits.  I really enjoy being able to use the “Next Ten Sites” button within the toolbar to have 10 tabs open up in Firefox and be able to wander through them as I desire.

Yes, it’s great for effectively dropping ECs, but I’ve always said that I actually LIKE going around to different blogs and checking out their content, site design, what ads they’re running, etc.  So this serves that purpose as well.

This is a screen shot of my toolbar right now – I just went and spent all my saved EC’s on ads so I’m starting from scratch.  It doesn’t take up a lot of room at all, and offers you different choices of category to browse within and different ways to order the results: Most popular, Newest, Cheapest, Most expensive, Most advertised, and Random.  The final benefit – and best – is that while you’re surfing these blogs the toolbar updates to tell you how many ECs an ad on that site costs, if you already have an advert in the queue for that site, and allows you to purchase adverts by clicking on the button that shows the price.  You can also add the blog to your favorites site by clicking on the heart.

The only downside to the toolbar is that it’s a toolbar.  Sounds weird, I know, but what I mean is that I have two other toolbars and I can’t toggle this one on or off like the StumbleUpon toolbar to save screen space.  This isn’t a problem for me, but currently the toolbar only runs on Firefox 3 as an add-on, so anyone still using Internet Explorer to switching over to Google’s new browser Chrome will have to do things the old fashion way!  This is the first release of the toolbar with a second beta release out now, so hopefully in future releases they’ll address the browser compatibility issue.

Every website should have a favicon to stand out from the crowd.  What’s a favicon, you say?  A favicon is the small icon displayed next to a URL in the address bar of a browser.

I’ve written before about a nifty online tool to generate favicons, but that tool does require a bit of HTML knowledge and can work for every website.  This tool, the MaxBlogPress Favicon plugin, works specifically with Wordpress powered blogs to allow the blogger to choose from a gallery of favicons.

There are hundreds of favicons to choose from, so there’s not a chance you won’t find one in the gallery that suits the topic or theme of your blog.  This is the absolute easiest way to get a favicon that screams at the user and gets attention fast.

Yes that’s right – I have not abandoned the Free Toolsday feature.  Lots of things have come up, and I’ve been a bit uninspired, but like a flash it hit me what the best tool to feature today would be.  One that can make you money!

ScratchBack, a Jim Kukral project, is a great way for your readers and fellow bloggers to both show you some love and advertise their own blogs or websites.  It’s free to join and set up, with about 15 different stock designs for your widget.  You can also design your own using the guidelines from the website and they’ll hook it up with a nice custom one.  Obviously you can see over there ——> that I haven’t had the time or focus to do another custom design as I once had!

This is how it works: you put the widget on your site.  A reader comes by and decides that they want to tip you and get a link up all in one swoop.  So they click the widget, pay the tip to ScratchBack (YOU set how much of a tip you want!) and then ScratchBack pays you 90% of the tip (they have to keep the lights on, afterall).

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="540" caption="How it Works"][/caption]

You have the power to decide how much of a tip you want (the minimum is $5), how you want links to be bumped, if you want links auto approved, and more.  it’s one of the better widgets out there since it rewards you for your content while allowing other readers to promote their stuff as well.  It’s free to join if you just want to check it out and you’ll almost never get any emails from them – solicitation or otherwise. It’s also a great traffic source for you to go out there & reinvest – put your links on other blogs that employ ScratchBack!

I’m a big believer – so ask me if you have questions!