Don’t be an Entrecard Hater
Tastes Great vs. Less Filling. Designator Hitter vs. Letting the Pitcher Hit. Boxers or Briefs. These are all great subjects for endless debate. In the blogging world, I would say that the Entrecard or not debate belongs right up there. For some reason bloggers either completely hate the program and dismiss it as low quality traffic or they are religiously addicted to Entrecards and use it as there primary source of traffic. When a blogger either praises or trashes Entrecard, the responses triggered are usually very emotional. As a result, I quickly came to the conclusion that this would be a great topic for a post.
So who is right in this great debate? Well, let’s first take a look at the major perceived negative of the Entrecard sytstem.
“Yeah, you can get some traffic by using Entrecard, but all these visitors are only there to click on your widget. After they do that, they just leave. So your traffic is 100% useless”
Yes, there will be people that do just this, probably even the vast majority. But I wouldn’t dwell on this fact. Even if for every 100 visits you get from Entrecard, only one actually reads your blog, you still have gained one more chance to convert a visitor into a subscriber. In my case, at least two of my most active commentators and subscribers came across my blog via an Entrecards.
Therefore, I believe that ALL new bloggers should use the Entrecard system. (No, this is not kind some sponsored post or advertisement) You simply have nothing to lose and traffic to gain. When I first started blogging, I used all kinds of traffic exchanges to drive traffic to my blog. Of course, this was the lowest quality traffic imaginable, but I did manage to get a handful of quality readers from it. Since anyone arriving from Entrecards is a blogger, and bloggers are the most likely audience to check out new blogs, this traffic will be 1000% percent better than the traffic exchanges that I used.
What about more established blogs, especially a blog where ad space is at a premium? I would argue that these blogs do not really need to generate traffic in a manner with such a poor success rate. However, I would say Entrecards can be useful for you as well. Even if you end up with zero quality visits from Entrecard, you could still use your credits to sponsor contests. These contests could generate numerous backlinks and subscribers and would generate some great publicity for your blog. Since Entrecard followers are so fanatical about obtaining credits, your contest will likely be a success. Not interested in a contest and don’t know what to do with all the credits you generate? You can even sell your entrecards on ebay for some extra cash.
To conclude, I really do not understand why Entrecard inspires such negativity. There truly is no downside, and all bloggers, no manner if they are big or small, can benefit from the system. Even if you are not a big fan of the program, I suggest that you just keep your widget in a secondary location and then forget about it for a while. When you next check your balance, you may have a nice surprise.
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Filed under: Blogging Tips
Added. Nice work on this one. Btw, my blog is dofollow, stop by and grab a link. Bompa
The main reason I dropped it was that with the change in ad pricing it became an overpriced and ineffective method of advertising rather than a handy social networking widget. With much of the incentive to use it gone, I decided to remove it.
I also decided to remove 3 other sidebar widgets at the same time, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog and TopSpots. These 4 widgets greatly increased the load time of my pages and were ineffective in bringing in quality traffic or making money so I dumped them.
Interesting article.
I haven’t made a decision about entrecard yet. I know that I get traffic from people who only drop and don’t read, I hope Sezwho will change that, but so far I’ve had only one comment.
Google does punish for a high bounce rate, and droppers contribute to a high bounce rate.
You know, I think people tend to be negative about a good many things because they think it is the chic thing to do. Like it enters them in some exclusive club that makes them better than everyone else because they were the first to give something a thumbs down. I try to comment on as many blogs as I can, when I find something interesting to talk about. Google smoogle, if you write a good blog then your traffic will stop and you will get less bounce? It’s a theory anyway.
What most of the haters actually hate is there is work involved to capitalize on entrecard. They put up the widget and think it is going to draw them tons of people who read the articles and comment volumes of praise on them. What they don’t do is track their entrecard hits, advertise on the right blogs, or provide any of that comment giving traffic themselves.
Look for my 3 part series on entrecard this week on the listed blog.
Brad Harts last blog post..CommentLuv Links 7-25-08
@ Frank C–Good point about the loading time, that is something I didn’t consider.
@Carol–I agree, its pretty easy to write a negative rant. It takes much more time to write a post that looks at both point of views.
@Brad–Very true!! I will be checking out your entrecard series!!
I published part one of the series this morning http://bloggingfornoobs.com/traffic-building/entrecard-for-noobs/ You can look for the other parts on Wednesday and Friday
Brad Harts last blog post..What Is A Blog
I think that the system is great. For the first week or so, I was getting frustrated because of the high bounce rate. However, now I am noticing that some people stay and read posts on my blog and are starting to do so on a regular basis.
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