Well, since I had been talking about offering paid reviews through your blog lately, I thought of making Smorty a victim of my critique.

What is Smorty?

So what is Smorty? Well, the simplest definition would be: “It’s a network that connects advertisers and bloggers, and gives bloggers the chance to get paid to blog about the advertisers”. In another words, it’s one of those places THE place where you can get paid to blog.

Since 75% of the thousands of active independent bloggers are trying to blog for money and 7 out of every 10 companies believe that blogs would be more important in the next 20 years as a medium of information and are working constantly towards blog advertising, Smorty is the killer-deal.

The ethical nature of offering paid reviews through a blog had been questioned so much for so long. Some people like John Chow seem to charge $500 for a paid review while some people like my good friend Mike Huang seem to think it’s highly unethical. But, at the end of the day, what matters is what you believe. It’s your blog and it’s your morals. If you do a bad job at it, for an instance, being a sell-out, then it’s very likely that your blog will crumble down, as a result.

Some readers will absolutely hate you for delivering paid reviews and most of them will never care.

Alright! I think I’ve teased you guys enough so, without the over-rated “After the break”. So here are the winners of the “1650 ECs + Premium Blog Header + 12 FREE Ads Contest”…

There were over 700 entries for the draw and random.org, generated the list for me. The screenshot is here:

And here we go! Unveiling the winners!!

1. Max Miroff - Winner of 1000 entrecard credits + a FREE customized blog header + a FREE 125×125 ad on MindBlogger for one week + a FREE Text Link Ad on MindBlogger for one month
2. BobbyT - Winner of 200 entrecard credits + a FREE 125×125 ad on MindBlogger for one week + a Text Link Ad on MindBlogger for one month
3. Nishada - Winner of 100 entrecard credits + a Text Link Ad on MindBlogger for one month

The other 7 winners of 50 entrecard credits each and the Text Link Ads:

• Lady Rose
• Crystal
• Indo Contest
• Matt Ellsworth
• Rajram
• Niro
• Bob

So congratulations to you lot.

In the past, and every other day, I’d have this thing or the other and ultimately forget or will not be able to find the time I need to check the feeds of the blogs that I follow. Although I don’t follow many feeds by e-mail, with my Feed Reader(Google Reader), and my Following list(explained later) I pretty much follow 200+ blog feeds everyday. And by follow, I mean reading every single RELEVANT and IMPORTANT post that I come across. So this post is about “How I manage to follow 200+ blog feeds successfully, everyday!”

Letting my feed reader do most of the tracking for me.

Well, out of the 200+ I follow, 120+ are in my Feed Reader. I use Google Reader and I really hate to see a gazillion posts piled up at the end of everyday from blogs that have high posting frequencies.

I though I’ll never see the day! 1650 ECs, Customized Blog Header, 12 FREE Ads contest is officially closed as of the moment. Right now, I’m going through all your entries and tabulating them, and tomorrow the winners will be unveiled.

I’d like to take a moment to thank all of you who entered, and I sincerely wish all of you Good Luck with it. This contest had really made a difference for me and it had helped me immensely in getting an ethical blogger’s content out there in the blogosphere.

So, without further a-due, here’s the link love I promised.