When I gained control of this blog few weeks ago, I thought of giving the popular and debatable system called EntreCard a try. I had heard about it from a lot of people online but never really thought of trying it. One reason could be that the system is slightly difficult for newbies to understand and the information provided on the website is not very detailed and informative. Nonetheless, I decided to giving it a try.How does Entrecard work?
For those who do not know, Entrecard is a system that lets you place a widget on your blog with a banner that is linked to someone else's blog. Below the banner is a button called "Drop." Clicking that button proves that you have visited that blog (which has the widget). Each drop gets you EntreCard (EC) credits and you can use this currency to buy advertisements on other blogs. This system is supposed to be a way for bloggers to help each other out and discover new blogs.
But does the system really work? Does it have flaws that some are unaware of? Here are my Top 5 reasons to why I believe EntreCard really sucks.
1. Difficult to get drops back
When I first started using EntreCard, I was totally addicted to it. I found earning EC Credits fund and easy. I used to click on numerous blogs everyday just to drop my card and get some EC Credits. However, after few days I noticed that I had dropped around 50-90 cards everyday on average on blogs but I had only gotten around 20% - 30% from the EntreCard community. The stats declined more in the next few days and I hardly got any drops from other bloggers.
2. Visit, Drop, Leave
Most of the members of EntreCard only have one thing in mind and that is to quickly build EntreCard Credits so that they can either sell them to others or use them to advertise on other blogs. Having this goal in mind, most EntreCard members only care about visiting a site for few seconds, quickly searching for the EntreCard widget, dropping the card and then leaving the site without even taking a look at the content. Some of you may not agree completely but try to remember those days when you were desparate for some EC Credits and were crazily going through blogs after blogs. EntreCard does succeed in getting you some traffic but most of that traffic turns out to be useless. Many webmasters have noticed that traffic coming from EntreCard only lasts for few seconds on their blog and the bounce rate is as high as 90%!
3. Irrelevant Traffic
There is no doubt that EntreCard does provide you with at least some traffic if not a lot but even that tiny fraction is not of much use. As mentioned above, most EC members are looking to just gain EC Credits. They hardly have any interest in your blog's content. Placing your ad on a relevant blog might seem like a good idea to get some relevant traffic but the truth is that most of that traffic is trash and not beneficial to your blog in the long run. For example, if your blog is about American politics then you may get a lot of traffic from EntreCard but hardly any of it will be relevant since most of the visitors will not have any interest American politics.
4. Poor stats provided to advertisers
Once you have enough credits, you will want to place your ad on other blogs to gain more exposure and get more traffic. But just placing your ad on another blog guarentee you such results. While I was a member at EntreCard, I placed one ad on a blog with a good PageRank. I was hardly provided with any information about the blog's traffic, popularity etc by EntreCard. Eventhough I had insufficient knowledge about the blog, I still decided to place my ad for a day. A day later, when the time limit for my ad was over, I checked my stats only to see that I had recieved 0 clicks from the blog! Was that just coincidence? Could be! But the truth is that EntreCard needs to provide advertisers with some more stats to help them decide where to place their ads.
5. System is FLAWED
I saved the most important point for the last! Believe it or not but EntreCard system is flawed. The system is based on the concept that bloggers need to help each other to succeed. That is fine but it only emphasizes the value of traffic and not content. Most EntreCard members do not care about the content of a blog. They believe that joining EntreCard will bring them a lot of traffic even if they do not write unique and interesting articles on their blog. But the truth is that for a blog to be successful, it needs to provide something useful to the readers.
If you are an EntreCard member then I suggest that you think again about EntreCard and whether it is really helping you. If you have not tried it yet then you should give it a try and experience it yourself. There is nothing better than getting first hand experience.
Image Source
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Some useful links:
Search quality, continued - Google Blog
More Transparency in Customized Search Results - Google Blog
Back to school with more than 1 million users worldwide - Google Blog
Hello from A2 - Google Blog
We Knew The Web Was Big - Google Blog
Knol Is Open to Everyone - Google Blog
Updates and Fixes for July 18th - Blogger Buzz
Easy as 1-2-3 - Adsense Blog
9 comments:
In the beginning I was a little discouraged about entrecard but I think as I am spending time commenting on other's blogs and making friends it has almost become another social networking avenue for me plus now I can sell any excess credits which help me to purchase domain names or do other useful things with the money. I think with everything, it depends on the amount of patience you have to and really like you say what you want from a specific thing. We don't always have to agree on everyhting lol but your article is well written and you pose a valid argument evne if I am an entrelover lol.
I tried it as well and have to say that I came up with the same conclusion within a day or two. Most of the blogs I checked had not even been updated in a long time and their traffic stats were non-exsistent when checked on sites such as Alexa. So what is the use of advertising on a site such as that. There is no link value even if they have a pagerank since Google will not have it indexed fast enough for it to benefit your site.
If you were still on Ec , i am sure you would have got alot of comments for this blog, if you had stayed longer you could have made some friends in the community who would have pointed you in the right direction. "low quality traffic" if there is any such thing, is better than no traffic. Entrecarders are ordinary people like you and me if they drop and run it's only because you did nothing on your blog to hold their attention. All the best.
@Alfred - First of all thanks for reading my article. I really appreciate it.
Secondly, I did stay on EC for a couple of weeks to know it more than enough. I don't want to stay on EC just to get some random comments such as "nice blog, wanna exchange links" and other stuff like that. Having comments is not a big deal. It is just an indication of the fact that people are reading your articles. Comments should be like the one that you wrote and the previous two that give you suggestions.
Also, I agree to some extent that low quality traffic is better than no traffic but it does not apply to all types of blogs. Some webmasters only look for relevant traffic.
Finally, believe me I had a lot of good posts here to hold their attention. Not all EC members are like you. They don't read posts and only care about dropping cards. Please remember that I am not talking about all the members and I am not blaming other members either because that's just how the EC system is built.
Thanks,
admin
It was really nice to read this post. I am blogging since last few months and heard about EnterCards many times but had no idea that what it is and how it works? But as you said, i would like to give it a try... Thanx for explaining EC
Regards,
Shaan Haider
I have to agree that content has to be relevant to commenting. I'm going to drop cards but I'm not going to comment unless the post interests me. There are many blogs that don't have interesting content. If they do they get added to my favorites and I check in every other day or so.
Here's my biggest question about EC: To be certain, the top ranking blog on EC must get a tremendous amount of EC traffic (since blogs rank based on the number of card drops on their site), yet the top blog on EC has an Alexa ranking of nearly 500,000?
@Greg - The blogs are ranked according to how much EntreCard credits you need to advertise on them. So when you go and click on "campaign", you will see the most expensive blogs first.
hey entrecard just deleted my account just because they dont detect the widget in my blog. but the reason way is i am currently repairing my site!
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