Entrecard Review

I’ve had Entrecard for a week or two now and thought I would write about how it has worked out for me thus far. It definitely has its ups and downs, and it isn’t quite what it was advertised either which kind of sucks. However, does the new age of link exchanges really work? Is it what it used to be? Or has that age of the internet passed once and for all?

The first thing to note is that yes in fact my traffic has gone up really well. I get on average of about ten extra hits a day. I do about 20 drops a day (on average some days more) so I end up getting back about half of what I visit. I don’t necessarily consider these hits real however by any stretch.  In reality, I assume most of these hits are from other EC members whom are doing nothing more than visiting my site for drop points.

The real question then becomes, is this a bad thing? Overall, I would say no. Because of these extra drops, I also get EC points so it isn’t like I get nothing from the visit even if these people never become actual visitors who read and return to my blog just for the sake of the blog. Still, even beside that, having some extra hits in my stats isn’t a bad thing. This looks good for advertsiing which could land me more money in the long run just from having the extra hits. And if by chance someone clicks on a random ad just once a month could potentially generate income (and 1 click per month I don’t think is unheard of considering that’d be about 300 hits).

I’ve also run several advertising campaigns to varying degrees of success. In this exchange instead of just automatically getting one banner ad shown elsewhere for ever 2-3 you show on your page… you can purchase a 24-hour block on another site. The amount you pay for that is dependent largely on how many advertisements that site has in the queue but supposedly also is modified by the amount of traffic the site generally gets. Cheap sites range from 2-8, more expensive site get over 256 sometimes. Thus far on four or five adverts, I’ve gotten a total of three clicks which I guess isn’t overly horrible. And may be more honest traffic than the drops, though I suspect that most of what you get again comes from the site owner. Another issue I have seen is that site owners will often buy adverts on their own site in order to bump up the cost of others to advertise on their sites. So instead of costing 2EC for not having anything in queue, it costs 8ec for having just the 1. Kind of silly that this is even allowed.

Another feature that Entrecard really touted was that you could spend EC that you earned on both a shop where you could buy books and other goods, or you could exchange that EC for real money. This particular feature hasn’t turned out to be true at all as they apparently discontinued both at some point in time. You aren’t even allowed to sell ec on eBay anymore which used to be the primary way people could make money off of it previously. This isn’t entirely a gamebreaker. These type of services are more about getting your word out than making money. However, making money might drive larger sites to want to put the banner on their websites who may not need to advertise elsewhere and thus allow a small site to gain traction which is the whole point.

My other real complaint is that there really aren’t a lot of websites on the service. Even worse, the sites that are there seem rather sparse at best. It would be kind of nice if Entrecard would deactivate some of these sites if they haven’t been updated in like three months. After all, a lot of the sites using Entrecard are blogs and if they haven’t had an update since May, chances are they are dead. In addition, you often go to sites to place a drop and the site is no longer there and sometimes when you click the drop button, the person isn’t a member so you get no drop! It is really weird but they really need to work on housekeeping.

Overall, Entrecard has a lot of promise to it. I do believe that link exchanges are needed to help get smaller sites like mine the people they need in order to get their feet off the ground. Unfortunately there aren’t really decent banner exchanges ever since the demise of Link Exchange at the hands of Microsoft. Now these types of sites almost completely rely on sites like Digg for their traffic, which sucks because as a site owner, there is very little I can do to help my site get ranked higher on Digg. But there is something I can do to help my site with banner exchanges. I think if Entrecard cracks down on the cheaters and the inactive website, the service could be a great one for web site growth.