Entre Card has been a pretty good friend of my blogs in the past. One of my blogs was receiving over 100 visitors per day with a peak around 190. I had one day in which 120 visitors appeared from the one ad placement.
Over time, the number of visitors dropped off, even though I increased the number of ads shown each day. The problem I think is two fold. People are busy. Who has the time to visit 100 plus blogs each day – and make the visit worthwhile. Sure, you can fly around and visit 300 blogs in an hour, for some even quicker, but talk about the bounce rate. I would much rather have one visitor that stayed than 100 that arrived clicked the banner and left again.
The second problem I see with Entre Card is simply the unfairness – almost greed, of the owners. Taking 75% of the ad price is pretty tough. Taking another percentage when you transfer credits between accounts is even more so.
Adding to the credits taken in the form tax – and yes it is a tax – is the sale price of credits. I know if Entre Card was set up in Australia they would have been closed down by now. By banning the sale of credits and insisting that users buy through Entre Card, at inflated prices, is a restraint of trade and it also brings up issues of monopolies, again, a corporate issue that is illegal here in Australia.
The concept of Entre Card was good. The encouragement of quick hit and run visiting is very wrong. It’s not too late. They can turn it all around. They can create a better experience in a number of ways.
If I owned Entre Card the first I would do is turn into one huge directory with unpaid links. You could be active showing the full widget or inactive showing a simple link. The links in the EC would soon boost it’s PR and of course the links to your site would be valuable.
Whilst on changes, I would reduce the ‘tax’ providing users with a better return. What is needed is a way to get users who visit your site to stay a while longer, not just clickj and leave.
Entre Card has been a good concept. However, not being able to buy credits at market price will see power users going – in their droves. Wake up EC, you’re losing the battle. l
You don’t seem to be a member of Entrecard,at least I can’t find the widget…
As for “greed,” it’s hard to say how that term applies when Entrecard simply cancels 75% of the nonmonetary credits “spent” on advertising. (Yes, I know it’s possible to pay Entrecard for credits, and those sales would decline if users got more credit for advertisements placed on their site. But I can’t imagine Entrecard makes serious money off of selling credits.)
Hi Kirk
I was a member of Entre Card – I still am on one of my other sites. I agree that EC probably doesn’t make serious money from selling credits so I have to wonder why they put such a high price on them.
Entre Card seem to have upset a lot of people – and I am talking about ordinary people, not those that tried to rort the system. I am all in favor of Entre Card. It worked really well for me for quite a long time. It seems to have gone astray somewhere.
It seems a strange system where it can cost 1000 credits to advertise on a blog, but 750 of those credits are canceled and lost to the advertiser. I am sure if the government canceled 75% of your paypacket each week we would all scream blue murder and sack the government.
thanks for adding to the conversation, cheers
les
I finally removed Entrecard from all of my blogs. It was OK when I was putting the effort in of doing powerdropping but once I stopped really acting as a good member of the community there was really no value in it to me. Mostly it just brought spammers.
I am a member and have been using it for a few weeks. I get a lot of traffic from it but I wonder how much of it is quality. What do you think is a good secondary source if you want to use a different service? Nice write up./
Harrison – thanks for your comment – nothing beats commenting on blogs. Entre Card works okay if you take the time to leave comments on blogs you visit. Otherwise, BlogCatlog is good but nothing beats Google and for that you simply need some reasonable seo and patience
cheers
les
Hey very nice blog!! Man .. Beautiful .. Amazing .. I will bookmark your blog and take the feeds also…
Thanks for the time replying to my post. I will check out Blog Catalog. I’ve just signed up with Blog Burst. I hear good things about them but who knows!