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Today I have signed up for Entrecard after getting an email from the CEO, Graham Langdon. Entrecard is the square widget (the 125×125 button on the top right of my blog [or at the bottom of this post]) that is like a virtual business card. webmasters can install them on their blog, and then when you visit another website using Entrecard, you can “drop your card” much like you would in real life meeting a new business acquaintance. Every time you drop your Entrecard on another blog, or every time someone drops one on yours, you earn a credit. Credits can then be cashed out by advertising you 125×125 button on other websites running the widget. I have installed Entrecard to give it an official case study to see how well you can network with other bloggers, and how well the advertising system works. I want to see if the idea actually benefits everyone, or if the theory is only good on paper (Communism anyone?).
- The Pros:
- Free and easy to use
- Has cool analytics/graphs
- No annoying emails
- Big bloggers are testing the waters with it
- Pretty much unique
- Has the potential to benefit the little guys, as well as the big guys
- The Cons:
- The widget looks ugly
- A lot of bloggers have ugly buttons
- The system is easily abused
- Big time blogs may get overrun with advertisers and disable the widget (Shoemoney)
- Lots of blogs drop their cards to earn credits, has little “networking” in it.
- The “categories” page provides little benefit to the newer blogs.
- The “categories” page provides little benefit to the blogs “below the fold”
- The “categories” page has a few widgets that are repeated for 5 block.
The case study: I will be running Entrecard and dropping cards over the next month or so, and if Entrecard can help increase website traffic, I will continue using it. My goal is to get one new reader for every reader that I refer to Entrecard. If I can get 25 readers who have not visited my blog before, to subscribe to the rss, then I will gladly promote Entrecard in return. The site looks like it has potential, after they fix a few kinks (Every site has kinks, I have no doubt the final product will fix a lot of issues). If you want to join the case study with me, feel free to join Entrecard, otherwise you can wait a month until I will lay down my update on whether or not it helps increase website traffic. I hope Entrecard works how Graham intended, and benefits everyone!
Feel free to drop me your card:
The idea is pretty unique,I am going to put that widget into my blog….hope this works for any niches
I’ve noticed good results with it so far. It really depends on where you choose to advertise your card. I think that they should have it where you can set the number of credits to advertise, although the way it is now allows smaller blogs a chance at getting onto a bigger/more visited blog.
I’m pretty happy with it so far - been getting a bit of traffic - plus found some sites that I probably wouldn’t have before…Good luck!
PS - I love rssHugger as well!
Will be applying to rssHugger soon, it’s an interesting concept and sure to bring more visitors to nice blogs. I’ve bookmarked it.
I’m going to give it a try, we shall see how well it works.
It sure looks ugly. I may wait.
I’m having fun using it and a bit happy with the traffic. Hopefully, more and more people will join in so we can have a lot of websites to choose from.
I joined Entrecard a few days ago and have had ~20 visitors come from it. It doesn’t take up too much of my time and it’s basically free traffic so I think I’ll keep it on for a while.
What I’m really hoping for is to be there when John C(h)ow’s blog gets an open slot. That should boost my traffic a bit.
[...] PS: Graham is also the developer of EntreCard. [...]
[...] feed or get your blog updates by email. Thanks for visiting!This is a followup to my earlier post Entrecard - fantastic idea or a flop. At first glance, the website looked entirely confusing and hard to understand, but it only took a [...]
I just applied for an account on EntreCard.com. I dropped my own card on my own widget on my local test server. What a dump am I… now no credit left. Anyone care to give me some friendly coupon?