Entrecard Update

I was going to wait a week before posting about Entrecard, but I think I've got a good enough view of it to make an early update.

Does it work?

Yes, there is a definite traffic increase which can be tracked to Entrecard.

What is involved

For those of you who may not have read the first part of this, a recap:

You get the extra traffic in two ways. The first is from adverts that you place on other peoples sites. You buy the adverts using credits which you earn by dropping your card on other people's sites, or by allowing other people to advertise on yours.

The second way is via the cards that you have dropped. In your "Drops Inbox" you can see all the cards that people have dropped on you, and click on them to see their site.

Show me the stats

Well, in my case I've had adverts running every day (between one and three so far). This has brought in 21 extra hits. Clicks from Entrecard back to me (mainly from drops) accounts for a further 123 hits. So for me that works out at around 50 additional hits a day.

So as far as extra traffic goes, that is fine. I could probably boost my traffic more by visiting and dropping cards on more sites (something I'm not doing an awful lot of).

When I last posted about Entrecard, Ria (from Ria's Crazy Movie Reviews) made the points that around 80% of the traffic you are getting is "Junk", as well as some people relying on drops to boost their traffic rather than posting quality articles.

These are certainly points worth bearing in mind, and is true for almost all of these social networking schemes. Almost all of them can be "gamed" in some way or another. Great for ad stats, not so great if you actually want people to read your stuff.

I'm taking the view that the additional visibility that this gives your site should - hopefully - give you more exposure to real readers too, and so is probably worth it.

Something that I have learned about Entrecard is that there are an awful lot of "Hello World" blogs out there. I'm not sure why people are doing this, but there seems to be a large number of new Entrecard members whose site just consists of "Hello World" and the Entrecard tool.

Advertising with these is just wasting your time and credits. Personally I think it may be time for Entrecard to start vetting some of the new sites to make sure that these fake ones don't get started.