The Occasional Entrecard Post

Entrecard seems to be a love it or it hate it kind of thing. I’m feeling kind of so-so about it. For me it all started when I was giving a thing called BlogRush a shot, and found that I got zero traffic from it. Evil Woobie wrote a nice post about how much she loved Entrecard and I was there with the first few waves of users.

I had a bit of free of time and it was fun following the the ads on Entrecard widgets and seeing where I ended up. I had never seen most of these blogs and was a bit surprised to find a few big names using Entrecard. So I put the widget on If You Write It and whipped up a little 125×125 ad and-well, not much happened.

I am a pretty passive Entrecard user. I don’t have a quad processor nor do I have three or four hours a day to drop cards. So I have a few sites that I like bookmarked and I stop by when the mood strikes me and drop a card and maybe leave a comment. I have found a number of blogs that I like through Entrecard and a number of blogs that are mind numbingly bad. Or at least I thought they were mind numbingly bad when I first started hopping from blog to blog-now I tend to think that all blogs have their off days and their on days.

The way Entrecard works is that someone buys the space on your blog with Entrecard Credits and hopes that people will click on the ad and visit their blog. These ads cost between 2 ECs and 8192 ECs-at least that’s the highest price I see today. There is some formula that sets the price of the ads, but it keeps changing I am really not that interested.

Anyone that wants an ad on my blog I have approved. When I buy ads, I set the price pretty low and then buy ads on all the blogs that are within my price limit until my ECs run out. Now sometimes I am buying ads for like 8 ECs-I seldom buy ads that cost more that 64 ECs. When I select a group of ads to buy there are always one or two bloggers that decline my ads. That’s fine, they don’t have to put my ad on their blog if they don’t want to. I just find it funny sometimes that some bloggers seem to take Entrecard pretty seriously. None of us are exactly the Wall Street Journal when it comes to great ad space.

One of the odd little things about Entrecard is that having a top Entrecard blog does not seem to translate into having a top blog in the real world. Things like Pagerank and Alexa Rank and whether your listed in the Search Engines are, for the most part, beyond the control of the average blogger. Not so with Entrecard. Want three hundred ECs? Open a bunch of tabs and start dropping cards. Want a Pagerant higher than 5? Well, hmm, uh, ProBlogger did it, so how hard can it be? A bit harder than dropping Entrecards all day.

Over the past few months it has been interesting to see how quickly some people stop using Entrecard and how many others just stop blogging all together. What? You expect to me to do this like, everyday? And poof they are gone. I always find it a bit sad when a blog just disappears, even though I have vanished more than one blog myself. There’s that odd little shock, oh, there not there anymore.

The Serious Entrecarders don’t even slow down and notice, as they are dropping as fast as their little fingers will let them. Read the posts? Leave a comment? Get real-I’ve cards to drop here buddy.

I get a few hits from Entrecard users-but I’m really a keyword junkie and get the bulk of my traffic from Google. From time to time I have seen traffic counters that show thousands of hits from Entrecard, so it is clearly working for some people better than it is for me. I still like it and when I have the free time to play around with it, I like reading what other bloggers have to say.

So I’ll keep using Entrecard in my not very serious and not very active way and see if I can find a few more blogs worth reading once in a while.

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