Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

Entrecard started life as a way for bloggers to show a 125×125 advert for their blog on other blogs. It was all powered by a points system with points being awarded for various actions (too many to list here). As with any freebie system there comes the time where the owners will want to start making money from it. Fair enough. Entrecard have played around with a few gimmicks and ideas in the past but have just recently released what I suspect was probably the overall aim of setting up Entrecard in the first place, a paid advertising network. With pay per click costs as low as 0.04 cents and pay per impression costs as low as 0.60 cents per thousand (both for subject targeted) I just had to give it a go. Somehow it’s left me a little bit dazed and confused, and here’s why.

Who would ever have thought that Entrecard would have become so big so quickly? Not me, that’s for sure. Whilst I thought it would be big news amongst small/medium size bloggers there is no way I predicted that it would have such a large affect on blogging in general. I see Entrecard widgets on almost all of the blogs I visit now. The cool thing is that it does bring traffic so why not?

The Danger Of Entrecard
I was recently asked by somebody to explain the benefits of “free”, he just didn’t get it. Entrecard is a great example of how free can help, there is no way that it would have grown to this size if you had a sign up fee. It just wouldn’t. Nor would it have had the huge amounts of exposure across some of the biggest names in the world of blogging. However, free comes at a price. That price is usually quality. In Entrecards case it’s not the quality of the service itself (it’s as professional a setup as anything paid out there) but it’s in the quality of the members. As the word spread the quality of many of the members blogs was “dodgy” at best, then came the start of the abuse of the messaging system to spam fellow bloggers. Of course everybody is already aware as well of what appears to be huge discrepancies in advertising prices, unless you go for a named blog it’s pretty much a lottery as to how much traffic your ad spot will generate.

All of the above factors are down to Entrecard being a free network and are out of your control. However the biggest danger of using Entrecard is completely in your hands and it’s something I think is going to become a big issue down the line. Bloggers are starting to become obsessive about Entrecard. Spending hours dropping hundreds of cards, boosting not only their own advertising prices but also those of the random blogs they choose to drop on. It’s very easy for people to treat Entrecard as their only source of link building just because it’s so damn easy to drop a card. Rather than spending hours dropping you could be writing new content, commenting on other people’s blogs, creating forum posts, sourcing directories, using Stumble and any number of other ways of link building.

I’m not anti-Entrecard, I use it and will continue to, however I don’t spend much time dropping my card. In fact the only card drops I do are when I visit a blog (usually found through a link on another site or search) and like it. I certainly don’t spend hours on the Entrecard dashboard random dropping. Entrecard can be a good source of visitors to your website but over use it at the expense of your other link building techniques and I think you’ll be sorry in the long run.

Entrecard have a great little system going that is really starting to have quite an impact on the blogging community. I first wrote about Entrecard here, where you can find out more about what the system does. In that time I’ve used Entrecard to kick start the traffic on a few new Blogs, it’s a great way of getting those initial visitors.

However like any system that has benefits there are plenty of people who will try and game it. I’m guessing that there are a fair few people using bots to auto drop their card and apply to advertise on any new blog that enters the Entrecard system. There are also what appears to be some highly inflated advertising point costs that when you do advertise actually deliver very little traffic if any. With this in mind I thought it would be useful to show the websites I’ve advertised on and the number of clicks I’ve received, some are obviously much better than others. If we all did the same then the cheaters would soon be ousted.

Well this blog is dying on its arse isn’t it, a simple “post a comment” competition and only 2 entries, ah well. Anyway congratulations go to SEO Optimization for winning, if you can drop me a line with the e-mail address you use for Entrecard I’ll have the points sent over ASAP.

I’ve decided to run a little competition to win some Entrecard points. I’ve got 200 to give away which should be enough to place a couple of adverts on some fairly well positioned blogs. Either that or you can save a little and try and blag a spot over at johnchow.com

All you have to do to win is leave a comment on this post (1 entry) or mention and link to this contest in one of your blog posts (2 entries). Obviously you can only leave 1 comment but if you’ve got more than 1 blog please feel free to mention it more than once for multiple entries.

I’ll do the draw some time around Friday lunchtime (GMT). Good luck one and all.

First things first, www.entrecard.com will get you more traffic to your blog, I started using it yesterday and this is my analytics unique visitors chart.

So what is it? Entrecard is a system that allows you to build up credits to display a 125×125 advert on other blogs. You build up credits by dropping your card on other blogs that are using the system, by having people drop their card on yours and by selling your entrecard spot.

Once you’ve got these credits you can then buy an advertising spot on your target blog (Just like Internet Riches Exposed has done with me). So far I’ve not used my credits to buy a spot on anybody’s blog, all the traffic I’ve seen has come from me dropping my card of on other people’s blogs and them checking me out but it’s already quite a spike. Can’t wait to see what happens when I get enough credits to pop my advert up on ShoeMoney for a day! Overall it’s a quick, simple and free system for attracting visitors. I reckon this kicks the ass out of BlogRush not only in terms of looking nice but also is getting those vital visitors.