Blog
Not that this has anything to do with Costa Rica, but I thought I’d chat a bit about blogs. They are becoming incredibly popular and lots of bloggers are looking to drive more traffic to their sites. Here are a couple new tools I found to help with this:

Link2Blogs is a free text link exchange that provides blogs the ability
to cross-promote each other. Member blogs display a box containing text
links in order to earn credits.
How it works? Very simple. Sign up, place a simple html code into
your blog and that’ll display Link2blogs box in your blog. Every reader
that clicks on blogs listed in your Link2blogs box will earn you
credits.

You can earn extra credits thru referrals. For every blogger that
signs up with Link2blogs (and gets validated) earns you 10% of the
credits your downline earns (up to 5 levels deep). And you can always
buy extra credits in order to increase the volume of readers to your
blog

The other service I’ve been using is called BlogMad. Bloggers earn credits by surfing other member’s blogs and are rewarded with credits. The credits are then used to purchase traffic back to their own blogs
or can also be used to play different games on the site. Bloggers
  can use all the various features of blogmad to boost traffic to their blogs. The site is jam packed full of games and other fun things all which
allow bloggers to use their credits to wager against other bloggers to
win more credits.

Personally, I don’t use the games. I’d rather use the credits to have other people find my site. But if they are anything like me, they aren’t really looking at my site. 80% of the blogs I "have" to surf in order to get credits, I don’t read. But it does help boost your numbers for potential advertisers.

I’ve heard this book that is supposed to be great at showing you how to  launch your blog, develop a style, and make your business stand out — whether or not you’ve blogged before. It’s called Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies. Check it out!

And if you happen to find — or know of — better tools, please let me know. Thanks!