EntreCard is a popular advertisement platform. Its specialty is that you can get free advertisement on 125x125 buttons on popular blogs, thereby free traffic. Thousands of bloggers have already adopted EntreCard for free advertisement. Here, I will not introduce EntreCard; it will be a wastage of time here, but I will bust a myth on EntreCard and give you some guidelines as to purchasing better ads on EntreCard.
Have you ever actually looked at how much of your traffic is coming from your EntreCard ads? How many of you purchase advertisements from actually popular blogs other than those shown as popular on EntreCard? People, when they look for blogs to advertise in EntreCard, they go to the search feature, and look for the most popular blogs in a particular niche. If you check out the blogs listed there, you will see that most of the top blogs take thousands of Entre credits for a day’s advertisement. These credits you spend to advertise on a particular blog is your hard earned money. And you should be more than careful to advertise on the correct blog to get maximum advantage from it. Also, you should be well aware of how much traffic the advertisement is sending to your blog.
How Do the Blogs Become Popular on EntreCard?
There are ways the bloggers can become popular on EntreCard. These blogs needn’t necessarily be high traffic ones. In fact, a blog that gets ten visits daily may be listed as popular in a category and can take thousands of credits to advertise on. People, when they see that a particular blog is very popular on a category, compete to get ads on that blog and as a result the ad spot price goes exponentially up.
There are a number of bloggers, who do drop exchanges for getting high number of credits. As you know, EntreCard has a messaging feature, with which you can easily message any other EntreCard user. This can be well exploited.
Two months ago (I was never active in EntreCard), I got a message from one EntreCard user who requested me for a drop exchange. I declined. When you do drop exchanges, you will get inflated drops on your EntreCard, which are direct votes to your popularity there.
When people continue to drop EntreCards on others’ blogs, and get exchange drops, their credits go up and hence their popularity.
When an unassuming advertiser looks for the best blogs to advertise on, he sees the popular blogs and thinks that these are the highest traffic blogs out there and bid an ad spot. They don’t realize that the popularity in EntreCard can quite be made up.
How to Find the Right Blog to Advertise on?
You should analyze traffic and quality of a blog by looking at the following factors:
1. Alexa Rank: Alexa rank, though largely regarded to be inaccurate, is a great indication of long-term, consistent traffic of a blog. Hence, any blog with lower Alexa rank is better in terms of traffic.
2. RSS feed subscriber count: You can check the subscriber count of a feed easily at Feedcompare.com (that is if the blogger himself doesn’t show his feed count on the blog). The feed count is a great indication of the actual popularity of a blog.
3. Compete Search Rank: Compete rank can show you the actual number of visitors to a blog on a given month. Look at the following visitor statistics of EntreCard.com from Compete. I got an advertisement on Entreblog, two days ago for 1024 credits.
(click the pic to enlarge)
4. The time for which the blog has been active: Is the blog new or has a long history. This is an important metric indeed. Just check out the blog’s archives and you will easily know how long the blog has been there. Otherwise, the easy way is searching on Google: First go to the Advanced search, then choose the option “Date, Usage Rights, etc.,” and just search for the URL. You will see that Google actually shows you the date of indexing of the website. Look at the screenshot below:
(click the pic to enlarge)
This shows when exactly the site was indexed. Now, you can read all these information together: Alexa rank, RSS subscriber count, age of site, Compete visitor number, etc. You will have a good idea of whether the site is really popular or not outside EntreCard. Only then, should you even think about advertising on that blog.
The Paradox
Here is the Compete Search Rank comparison of two of the popular blogs in EntreCard. The first one is the EntreCard blog itself, which gets tens of thousands of daily visits. The other one is a blog (which I will not disclose) in the business category. Both these blogs take now 2048 Entre credits to place an ad. But the paradox is that their Alexa ranks are way different, and so are their visitor stats. The latter gets only less than thousand visitors daily, while as I said, Entreblog explodes in traffic.
(click the pic to enlarge)
People, when they see this site as very popular on EntreCard, go ahead and bid on the ad spot. Several people bid for the spot and the ad price goes up immensely. The result is that this blogger gets thousands of Entre credits daily and with those credits, he can purchase an advertisement on huge A-list blogs like Problogger, and get a great spike on their analytics graph.
Why should we allow this? In my suggestion, you should not advertise on any blog, just seeing that it is popular on EntreCard. Instead, you should look for the actual popularity of the blog and eliminate each option. In that case, you will see that most of the popular blogs on EntreCard actually aren’t popular at all.
I never did any drop fraud or exchange and as a result, my blog is way low in popularity and my Entre advertisement price is most of the time 32 credits only. Too less and I have five or six ad purchasers who come again and again to purchase ad here. Many of the popular blogs there don’t have my Alexa rank or daily visit count. Next time, when you choose the blog to advertise on, show discretion and consider Entre credits as solid money; there are many people who actually purchase credits to advertise.
Related Entry:
Ways of Building Huge Traffic to Your Blogs
Copyright © Lenin Nair 2008
Have you ever actually looked at how much of your traffic is coming from your EntreCard ads? How many of you purchase advertisements from actually popular blogs other than those shown as popular on EntreCard? People, when they look for blogs to advertise in EntreCard, they go to the search feature, and look for the most popular blogs in a particular niche. If you check out the blogs listed there, you will see that most of the top blogs take thousands of Entre credits for a day’s advertisement. These credits you spend to advertise on a particular blog is your hard earned money. And you should be more than careful to advertise on the correct blog to get maximum advantage from it. Also, you should be well aware of how much traffic the advertisement is sending to your blog.
How Do the Blogs Become Popular on EntreCard?
There are ways the bloggers can become popular on EntreCard. These blogs needn’t necessarily be high traffic ones. In fact, a blog that gets ten visits daily may be listed as popular in a category and can take thousands of credits to advertise on. People, when they see that a particular blog is very popular on a category, compete to get ads on that blog and as a result the ad spot price goes exponentially up.
There are a number of bloggers, who do drop exchanges for getting high number of credits. As you know, EntreCard has a messaging feature, with which you can easily message any other EntreCard user. This can be well exploited.
Two months ago (I was never active in EntreCard), I got a message from one EntreCard user who requested me for a drop exchange. I declined. When you do drop exchanges, you will get inflated drops on your EntreCard, which are direct votes to your popularity there.
When people continue to drop EntreCards on others’ blogs, and get exchange drops, their credits go up and hence their popularity.
When an unassuming advertiser looks for the best blogs to advertise on, he sees the popular blogs and thinks that these are the highest traffic blogs out there and bid an ad spot. They don’t realize that the popularity in EntreCard can quite be made up.
How to Find the Right Blog to Advertise on?
You should analyze traffic and quality of a blog by looking at the following factors:
1. Alexa Rank: Alexa rank, though largely regarded to be inaccurate, is a great indication of long-term, consistent traffic of a blog. Hence, any blog with lower Alexa rank is better in terms of traffic.
2. RSS feed subscriber count: You can check the subscriber count of a feed easily at Feedcompare.com (that is if the blogger himself doesn’t show his feed count on the blog). The feed count is a great indication of the actual popularity of a blog.
3. Compete Search Rank: Compete rank can show you the actual number of visitors to a blog on a given month. Look at the following visitor statistics of EntreCard.com from Compete. I got an advertisement on Entreblog, two days ago for 1024 credits.
(click the pic to enlarge)
4. The time for which the blog has been active: Is the blog new or has a long history. This is an important metric indeed. Just check out the blog’s archives and you will easily know how long the blog has been there. Otherwise, the easy way is searching on Google: First go to the Advanced search, then choose the option “Date, Usage Rights, etc.,” and just search for the URL. You will see that Google actually shows you the date of indexing of the website. Look at the screenshot below:
(click the pic to enlarge)
This shows when exactly the site was indexed. Now, you can read all these information together: Alexa rank, RSS subscriber count, age of site, Compete visitor number, etc. You will have a good idea of whether the site is really popular or not outside EntreCard. Only then, should you even think about advertising on that blog.
The Paradox
Here is the Compete Search Rank comparison of two of the popular blogs in EntreCard. The first one is the EntreCard blog itself, which gets tens of thousands of daily visits. The other one is a blog (which I will not disclose) in the business category. Both these blogs take now 2048 Entre credits to place an ad. But the paradox is that their Alexa ranks are way different, and so are their visitor stats. The latter gets only less than thousand visitors daily, while as I said, Entreblog explodes in traffic.
(click the pic to enlarge)
People, when they see this site as very popular on EntreCard, go ahead and bid on the ad spot. Several people bid for the spot and the ad price goes up immensely. The result is that this blogger gets thousands of Entre credits daily and with those credits, he can purchase an advertisement on huge A-list blogs like Problogger, and get a great spike on their analytics graph.
Why should we allow this? In my suggestion, you should not advertise on any blog, just seeing that it is popular on EntreCard. Instead, you should look for the actual popularity of the blog and eliminate each option. In that case, you will see that most of the popular blogs on EntreCard actually aren’t popular at all.
I never did any drop fraud or exchange and as a result, my blog is way low in popularity and my Entre advertisement price is most of the time 32 credits only. Too less and I have five or six ad purchasers who come again and again to purchase ad here. Many of the popular blogs there don’t have my Alexa rank or daily visit count. Next time, when you choose the blog to advertise on, show discretion and consider Entre credits as solid money; there are many people who actually purchase credits to advertise.
Related Entry:
Ways of Building Huge Traffic to Your Blogs
Copyright © Lenin Nair 2008
This is a very insightful thought process on selecting Entrecard sites to advertise on. I've learned a lot about how to be more selective in which sites to give my hard earned credits to.
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