Gary R. HessEntrecard has made its rounds on the blogosphere, but how good is it? Over the past month I have been testing the advertising capabilities by gaining enough points to display my 125×125 Entrecard on several leading bloggers, most recently John Chow.com.
At first the overall experience of Entrecard seems overwhelming–dropping cards, finding others to advertise on within my limited budget. Nonetheless, once my widget began showing higher on the advertising board within my category (Computers and Internet) credits were much easier to come by–I didn’t have to drop 200 cards/day anymore to be able to purchase ads.
Back to the advertising, John Chow’s blog was by far the best in terms of gaining credits; although, that was all I received. Almost all visitors from his blog dropped a card, then left moments after. I received zero new RSS subscribers and 0 new comments from the visitors (although I did receive one $1 tip).
In terms of most comments, there wasn’t just one. Several smaller blogs like DigitalOrder, Elite by Design along with two fair sized blogs, Web Atlantis and KIWIPULSE.
As far as RSS subscriptions, there weren’t any, at least not directly.
My stats as of 12/20/07:
So the question still remains, is Entrecard worth it?
Yes and no. To me it is. But then again, I have nothing better to place in the adspace just yet. The visitors are great and the comments left were generally friendly and intellectual. It is a great way to meet new people and discover blogs.
As far as money goes, it probably isn’t. If you want to put a nice banner ad in its place, by all means go ahead.
Do you use Entrecard? If so, recommend me.
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Written: Dec 21, 2007Tags: entrecard, traffic, visitors
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Just found Entrecard today - very interesting concept. Our blog has a huge audience due to our name being Gamil and everyone mistyping Gmail, so we recently started the blog to actually “talk” to those people. And, no, we didn’t create ourselves specifically to make money off typos…we’ve been around as Gamil since 1995. Anyway, we’re trying to convert a huge -audience by mistake - into an audience by intent and finding different advertising /marketing ways to do it. We have the added challenge of knowing that a large percentage of our traffic is from India or Brazil. Learning is fun, but wow, there’s a lot to learn. Anyway, I’ll write again with my thoughts after spending some time with this Entrecard dealio.
I like what I’ve read on your blog so far, and hope all goes well with you and your Entrecard experiment.
Thanks Beth. It’s much appreciated to get others advice on the product.
That has been my biggest complaint. Folks are not bothering to stop long enough to leave a comment. That is causing my bounce rate to go through the roof. I always try to leave a comment even if it is just to say “Hey I was here, nice blog.
“Hey I was here, nice blog by the way”
This is an interesting post. That is why I am so interested to see how much Entrecard credits are worth in terms of real dollars. I wrote a post about it on my blog but like Debo Hobo just said, comments are slow to come in (and so are visitors to the auction im running for Entrecard credits to try to get a sense of what each credit is really worth). It seems like more entrecard users are in it to simply drop and run without actually looking at content or subscribing. I for one take a look at a few posts and try to comment on each blog I visit. I just hope others visit my blog eventually and even subscribe to my RSS feed. But we’ll have to see if that happens.
This happens with most services like that, not to mention Digg or Stumbleupon..
To my experience with EntreCard, it is worth using it.
My blog which is quite new got several hits and some comments. Moreover it was a great opportunity to advertise in highly trafficked blogs and websites for free. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a chance getting my banner there either because they would not accept it or because I could not afford paying for that.
Great post!
I agree… it’s only good IF you don’t have something better to fill the space with. Otherwise, it seems to be a bit of a waste.
I have been using EntreCard for a while now. I am not happy with the recent changes in the ad purchase credit structure. I think they did it because so many people were gaming the system. Now, however, I have to sit there for hours just to get a couple of ads out there. They may have killed EntreCard with this change.
The question whether Entrecard is worth it or not is a very difficult one to answer. Deep in my heart, I will like to say it is not worth it. But then, I ask myself one question…WHY AM I STILL USING IT?
Some of us are rapped and locked down by Entrecard because Entrecard is one of its kind and we are like “not having anywhere else to go”. Without Entrecard, how will AZ Blogging have an ad spot on another blog? The admin of AZ Blogging is African and does not have online payment capabilities like credit cards and paypal to pay for advertising.
That was just an example. Do you understand me?