I am getting kind of tired of Entrecard so if you haven’t noticed I’ve slowly been weeding it off my site. I’ve now completely taken it off everyplace but the front page and the top droppers widget on my lifestream page. The concept of Entrecard isn’t completely awful, it is just too time consuming to make worthwhile.I’ve heard that once you get into the practice of it, it takes about 30 minutes to dropp 300 entrecards. That isn’t too bad actually, but unfortunately it takes me about 15-30 just to drop 100 which means if I actually wanted to do 300 it would take me an hour and a half.
On top of that, at this point I only have a list of about 60 common droppers that drop back when I drop. I suppose I could just use one of the lists that is provided by another site, but I wanted to grow my own list and get my own people. People that were somehow related to this blog.
But at the end of the day, even if I got my time down to the 30 minutes for 300 drops, I decided that I don’t want to spend my time on that every night when I come home from work. I’d rather do other things like write blog articles, write ehow articles, or play games. I don’t want to waste it on getting credits for advertising, especially on a network that is known for bringing a lot of false traffic to your site.
That isn’t to say that I don’t think that all the traffic hasn’t been worthwhile, surely I have gotten some regular new posters which I have appreciated quite a bit. But again, I guess I would just rather see my traffic grow more naturally. I think I get better hits when I write an article that strikes a chord with someone and they decide to post it on their site. If I get an article like that I get more than 3 times the traffic that I normally get with my dropping. Sometimes, it really has been between dropping and writing and I haven’t wanted to lose the droppers so I drop instead of write.
I’m not completely done with it so fear not, I just am moving in that direction. I moved the drop advertisements off most my pages, I am not actively searching NEW droppers. I’m mostly now just answering others drops, so if they drop me, I drop back but I’m not dropping anyone else. My problem at this point is I do have a lot of credits to spend and I do think that the advertising has a better chance of getting real viewers so I want to get my credits worth that i earned. That will take a little time, but in the meantime I will be earning less and less I am sure.
7 replies on “Weeding out Entrecard”
Did you try getting the Entrecard Toolbar for firefox? It’s kinda like the stumbleupon toolbar and it helps you surf through entrecard a lot faster. I’m finding with it I don’t have to work as hard to get to the blogs and I can glance over new posts on the blogs I like and hit that drop button and move on. It has made my time with entrecard much more enjoyable. Just my two cents 🙂 Oh and by the way I love the little purple dragon under your google ads.
Yeah I do use the firefox bar and yes it does help immensely, but it still takes time and I don’t have a ton of that right now. Like I said, when all is on table, I’d rather do writing in the half hour it takes to drop on entre and that’s what this blog SHOULD be about…
You must get linked on more popular blogs than I; I’ve never gotten more than ten at a time from any one article, except maybe the RPG Blog Carnival. The Entrecard seems to be better for me, or at least more efficient.
I get a good number from some of my incoming links yeah and I notice when I get a decent one quite easily. I do overall put more stock in natural incoming people than I do from droppers. Droppers generally drop and leave, you are a rarity my friend=P And though I appreciate you and the few others I’ve gotten from entre, the truth is that the work I put out to get the naturals is a lot less than the work I put into entre for the return I get. Tipa has been one of my oldest readers and came from pre-entre when I talked more about eq2, which I’m sure I lost more than a few readers from that change but oh well.
Makes sense. Doesn’t mean I can’t still be a little envious, though.
Oops, I just signed up for entrecard, what have I let myself in for? My blog is a niche (pinball) and I like my hits growing naturally (and they have). It was on Bloggeries forum that everyone seems to say entrecard is the one, but maybe not for me if there aren’t many similar blogs to advertise on (not that I’m even vaguely close to getting my head around it all yet).
I think that entrecard can be good depending on what you are looking for. I personally had gone in hoping for a decent advertisement exchange service and I don’t really feel that I got that. You do get advertising and I do value that, but it isn’t even really an exchange. You have to physically visit 64 sites (or visit 32 and have 32 people visit yours and drop) in order to get 1 advertisement for 24 hours on someone else’s site. I kind of like that you can get ads on a page for a full day actually, however like I said, this method is too time consuming. For what I’m looking for I’d rather do a standard ad 2:1 or 3:1 ad exchange. I think for what I am looking for maybe Project Wonderful may be better, the problem there is that they won’t give me a shot since I apparently have an exotic website layout.