I’ve been messing around with Entrecard on this blog since November or December and overall the system has worked. It brings traffic, even though the traffic is not really good. A few weeks ago Entrecard modified its method for generating ad prices. If you have anything to do with Entrecard then I’m sure you understand it but just incase I’ll recap. Originally the ad price was calculated by taking the average number of drops over the past 5 days on a blog and multiplying it by two. This gave you a price. This system was okay, but what it meant is the highest priced blogs where not necessarily the best performing. This was direct result of the fact that people who dropped more received more drops and as a result their prices went up and stayed up.
The system was changed so the price to advertise is based on supply. So the more people who want to advertise on a blog, the higher the price. Now overall I think this is fair. But there are some items I don’t like about the new system. The first is all the blogs are really high priced, even ones that don’t perform. Before I could grab spots on blogs in the 20-40 credit range and get fairly decent ROI from those blogs. The price was cheap enough that I could buy a lot of ads and keep them running all the time. That’s pretty much impossible now. Earlier I wanted to purchase some ads and I did not even look at any over 128 credits. Most of the ones I looked at did not look to be one that would bring me any clicks or not very many. I went through 1000 credits in just a couple of minutes. Now I have the credits because at first I dropped a lot of cards and i never spent as many credits as I earned. So I have over 20K in credits in my account. It took a lot of dropping for me to build those credits and I don’t want to blow them all on a few days advertising.
For this reason I’m seriously considering just giving up on Entrecard. I just don’t have the time to drop every day like crazy and without doing that then I don’t see how I can make this worth my time. At one time I could drop on weekends to the amount of credits that where allowed and then throughout the week on my favorites and have plenty of credits to keep my blog out there on numerous sites everyday, but there is no way I would be able to do that now. I’m going to need to decide if I want to keep this up or just offer a contest for all my credits and spend my limited time on other methods of promotion.
That is a great re-cap, I’ve not really looked into the entire structure, I do not have a math mind, and would need to get out my 2 x 4 to understand it. I spent a month dropping 300 a day, it did gain me some very loyal readers, and exposure. Now I have been concentrating on recip’s in my inbox, as well as dropping on new blogs that I run into.
Thanks for the good info.
Hmmm, Sounds like it might be worth a try!
I dropped it a few weeks ago right after the change. I saw it entirely as a social traffic widget, and a pretty decent one at that. Now it’s just a very overpriced way to advertise on mostly low traffic blogs.
i just started using entrecard and can totally understand ur frustrations. anyway (you may already know this) just to share, i stumbled upon this blogger over at tysblog who seems to have a faster way of dropping credits, perhaps u can give it a shot?
I started up with entrecard more recently. So far I am not really seeing a benefit traffic wise, but at least it has lead me to some pretty interesting blogs!
I have only purchased two ads and each has generated a whopping 1 click.