Entrecard.com Review
I’ve seen this site advertised on blogs I frequently visit but I didn’t really take notice until today. I was on a very popular blog and I noticed that he has a entrecard section, well; if he thinks its worth having on his site where he easily gets $10,000 a month in advertising then maybe it’s something I should look into. I wandered on over to the site, read about what they do and decided I would give it a shot. Signup was a breeze and within a few minutes I was logged in ready to go.
The idea is you swap blog ads, or that’s what I got out of it anyways. You add this little 125×125ish ad on your site and people then visit your site and are able to drop their entrecard’s on it. By doing this you get an ec point and they get an ec point. These points can then be spent on advertising on other sites within the entrecard network. This little ad on your site also acts as a space for others to advertise. When you first start off your site is pretty cheap, when my account was created people could advertise on it for as little as 2 ec points. Since my site was so cheap I was getting tons of advertisement requests, and so began my problems with the site.
First, every site could afford my ad space so my email quickly filled up with requests. My dashboard was filled with ads that wanted to be placed on my blog. At first it was exciting but it soon wore off when I learned I had to reject each one I didn’t want by clicking on a Reject link and then entering in a reason why I’m rejecting them. Normally with one or two ads this is no big deal but within the first 1/2 an hour I had over 20 requests and they kept coming in. They really need to add either a mass reject feature or an easy AJAX reject button for each one. Secondly, 95% of the sites that wanted to advertise on my site had nothing to do with my blog. I got advertisement offers for photo sites, drawing sites, food sites and of course the all important adult sites. Since anyone can request to be on your site you get all kinds of offers especially when you’re low on the price totem poll. I’m assuming that once my price goes up these offers with subside but only time will tell.
At the time of writing this I have 30 ec points which is enough to advertise on a few small sites or on one decent site for a day. The more popular sites (the one I mentioned at the beginning of this review) require hundreds if not thousands of ec points. This is my goal; I want enough to advertise on a major site for one day, I want to see what kind of traffic this can drive in to my blog. If I can get enough traffic on my site from this one day then it might be worth saving up my points, otherwise I don’t see myself continuing to use this site…to me their business model is a little flawed.
For the short time I was on the site it seems most of it is overrun by spam sites or money making schemes. Since it’s easy to earn points (by clicking on other peoples blog ads) anyone with half a brain can simply click on tons of blogs and earn enough points to advertise on tons of sites. I don’t like this; I think people should earn their status and not gain it by simply browsing blogs. I even found a few sites which make it very simple to earn points, basically it rotates the sites you can earn points on and all you have to do is click every 10 seconds. This to me is just asking for problems, plus there are sites already popping up offering to buy and sell ec points (they’re on eBay already). Entrecard is new so maybe they have not worked out all of the kinks yet but I think they really need to rethink this before the legit blogs figure this out and leave them with spam, money making schemes and adult sites…none of which I care to advertise on my blog. I like the idea but I don’t like the execution. I will continue to host the ad on my site for a little while longer and see how it turns out but I don’t have high hopes. Look for an update in a month or so.
Update: Well I learned that if you don’t reject the ads then you ‘queue’ gets full and no one else can request to advertise on your site. This is another flaw. Although this stops in influx of site requests it creates a new problem. As I mentioned in my main review I’m getting request from sites I don’t want to advertise for, currently I have offers for a truck site, a site on lions, a nursing site and a sports site…all of which have nothing to do with my blog. If I want more offers(hopefully more relevant sites) I have to first reject all of these(one by one) and then hope that the relevant sites request ad space before more non-relevant sites do. What a pain. It’s gotten to the point that after only two days I’m sick of logging in and rejecting the non-related sites in hopes to get a related one.
Update: Traffic is up…well, kind of. I will admit that using the entrecard service brings in traffic but it’s not the traffic that you want. Looking over my stats I can see a surge in people only hitting the homepage, staying for 10 or so seconds and leaving. This means they are entrecard users coming just to drop their card and run. I don’t spend time on my blog to have people come, click a button and leave. I was reading the entrecard forums and I noticed that a lot of people drop hundreds of cards a day; one woman admits she just goes to the sites and clicks the drop link for the max 300 sites a day. Another guy gave his secret of how he uses a firefox plugin to open all the sites in tabs and he just goes through them clicking the drop button. For some reason I don’t think this is what the creators of entrecard had in mind.
Comments, Questions, Suggestions...
I’m back with a slight update on the Entrecard system. I’ve had a little more time to get into the Entrecard thing, and the flurry of ad requests has reduced to a mere trickle, I’m pleased to say.
This means I have had more time to look at some of the other blogs which are using Entrecard - and there is some good stuff buried in there, and I shall be linking to some of it, in the hope that these sites return the compliment, although I won’t mind too much if they don’t.
Once I have earned enough credits, I’ll have a go at running a campaign and see if it generates an increase in the number of readers/subscribers.
I don’t just want more traffic, I want better quality traffic. And I think that intelligent use of Entrecard may help this happen.
Time will tell - and I’ll keep and eye on things and see where I am in a months time and so on.
Cheers,
Alex
Alex, you’re right about the traffic, now that my rates are in the high 20’s I only get 2-3 requests a day but I still have yet to see any that I would really want on my blog. Today will probably be my last day posting the ad on my site. I signed up for an ad on a site that I think will bring in some nice traffic but I plan on tracking it to see if it’s good traffic or not. If it is I might continue to use entrecard for the purpose of advertising my site but I doubt I will want to host any of their ads. Thanks for the comments, keep us updated on your progress.
[…] days ago I wrote a review on entrecard.com and how I didn’t think the site was really worth it and in my tens days of using it my […]
Interesting, and accurate IMHO, perspective on Entrecard. I’ve just signed up and have been almost overwhelmed by non-relevant ad requests.
I have accepted some, but, as you point out, it takes time reviewing the applications, and many do not really match what my blog is about.
I’ll give it a go and see if it leads to any long term increase in traffic - if that is, I stick with it for long enough…
All the best,
Alex