Entrecard

So I've been testing out Entrecard to see what kind of different traffic I can bring to my blog. Essentially, the idea behind Entrecard is you place their widget on your blog and advertise other blogs. Blogs "buy" these spots from you through Entrecard using the points they've earned through "dropping" on blogs (visiting other blogs with widgets and clicking on the "drop" button) or by showing an ad on their widget or posting blog posts.

So I've "purchased" a couple of ads on other blogs and it's nice because it'll tell you how many click throughs there were on that ad, etc. It doesn't bring a WHOLE lot of traffic, but it does bring some (thank you other Entrecard users who actually read my blog). Most of the traffic has a high bounce rate (they come, they click, they go). I've been known to do that on some blogs, but I usually try to at least look at the last entry they've posted.

The downside? Well, I wasn't sure about this until today. Besides bringing irrelevant traffic at times, if you buy high "priced" ads (blogs that have a lot of ads queued up) and they reject you, you are out of luck and out of those hard earned credits. So thanks to the blogs I tried to place an ad on (which, in my opinion WERE relevant) I'm out a whopping 384 points. It's a little disappointing. But oh well.

My final conclusion for Entrecard? Well, it's fun to see what time of people find you, and it does bring you some traffic, but if you get it, I wouldn't spend a lot of time trying to earn points and buy ads - it's hard to truly get a targeted audience to your blog. It's cheap though (free, in fact) so if you want just a little more exposure (albiet not necessarily the target audience) I'd try it out. Just don't rely on it for much if any of your traffic.