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.

Increasing visitors with Entrecard

As it has been a while since I've blogged about Blogrush (which doesn't really seem to work), Blogcatalog (which does) and some of the "scam" sites which are best to avoid, so it is time to take a look at another site which promises an increase in visitors: Entrecard

This is another "social networking" type site, in which you accept adverts for other peoples site, giving you credit to buy your own adverts on their sites. You can also gain credit by visiting other peoples sites and "dropping" your card. This is certainly a fun way to discover other people's blogs.

Does it work? Well, it is hard to tell at this point. I've definitely had an extra fourteen or fifteen visitors via Entrecard over the couple of hours since I've signed up, which is probably more than I've received from Blogrush in total.

It will take a couple of days before my adverts start appearing on other peoples sites, so I'll be interested to see if there is a sustained traffic increase from using this service.

As usual, I'll wait a week (unless spectacular results happen before then) and let you know what sort of a difference it makes.

Are you using Entrecard yourself? Is there a sustained traffic increase from using it? Let us know in the comments!

Update: Well, here we are 24 hours later and the results have been surprising - in that there actually are results! The adverts themselves which are currently running on two other blogs have brought in an extra 15 readers. Clicks from other users on the site has brought a further 32. So that's an extra 47 unique visitors that have come as a result of Entrecard in the last 24 hours.