Dave from Tailgating Ideas loved the idea of calling in a question so much he had to do it again. He brings up an excellent question; however, in this case, I want to leave it up to my readers to offer some feedback.
Dave wants to collect opinions on Entrecard and to be honest, I kind of do too. I have never signed up for it and I see that most every blog that I visit has their widget installed. Is Entrecard really what it has been cut out to be? Are you getting good traffic? Or, is Entrecard quickly becoming something that is just simply taking up too much valuable real estate on your sidebar?
I never signed up mainly for the reason that I saw everyone else signing up. I am not much of a follower and tend to fly south with others fly north. Unless someone can explain to me otherwise, I’d have to go with my gut feeling and guess that Entrecard isn’t what it all hyped up to be. I think they have done a great job with blasting out a ton of press and getting thousands of bloggers to use their widget and point links back to their home page.
But, I could be wrong, and that is where I’d like to see some people chime in. I’d like for you to share your experience with Entrecard. Can you give me some feedback about their program? Can you tell me if it has been worth your effort and worth the valuable space on your sidebar. The whole point to Entrecard is to get traffic, right? So are you getting traffic from using their service? It is worth the time to even sign up?
Drop me a comment and please share you’re experiences and thoughts about the Entrecard program. I am sure that I am not the only one who’d like to know. I look forward to reading the comments and asking a few questions along the way.
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Entrecard is great, but it’s mainly fake traffic just like StumbleUpon. Users just use it to get clicks, but rarely receives true subscribers. Comments are received, but subscribers are still low because it’s only being advertised to the Entrecard crowd. However, I use the widget, but I don’t depend on it and drop 300 cards a day
-Mike
I still like it.
To me it is a business card, no more, no less.
If you are on a site that you like, drop your card, and usually that person will come and visit your site. When someone drops a card on my site, I go and visit their site.
This has been an excellent way to meet some bloggers that I may not have had the opportunity to meet any other way.
I did an early Review of Entrecard, and I guess I need to go back and follow up on that.
It’s not the magic traffic button that everyone is looking for.
There’s no doubt, Entrecard brings traffic but as to the quality of the traffic it brings, I’m not sure you’ll like it. Entrecard traffic can potentially increase your bounce rate, which was the reason why an interested advertiser turned down their offer to advertise on my blog as soon as they found out that Entrecard is one of my major traffic sources.
Entrecard rewards you with traffic and overpriced advertising cost (on your blog) if you remain active. That means, you need to drop cards more often, advertise on other blogs and accept or reject advertisements on your blog.
If there’s one thing Entrecard helped me with, that’s improving my Alexa traffic rank. Most of Entrecard users are bloggers or webmasters who use the Alexa toolbar.
Cheers,
Rocky
Like David, I like this program, even now after using it for a month. But you must keep on it in order to keep getting the traffic. When I’m clicking on everyone’s sites, I get about that many clicks as well. But when I’m not clicking it seems the traffic really dwindles. I think if you really get into it it can bring in some nice numbers.
So far what I am hearing is that Entrecard does an average job with sending traffic but unfortunately this traffic being sent are “one hit wonders”, meaning that they don’t subscribe to your feed and they for sure don’t come back to your blog. The last part to that is you can’t get the above unless you work the program either, meaning you’ll have to always be active to get rewarded with crappy traffic.
One thing that is pretty cool, if people are still interested, I for one think the hype has died down about it thought, but Blogging Mix mentions that Entrecard helps build up your Alexa rank. I can vision that happening.
I agree with David C and HomeMom, for me personally, it has definitely increased my traffic. Because my blog is still in its early stages, and I’ve just recently picked up my posting, I was only getting about 10 hits a day. Since I joined Entrecard, my hits are now at an average of about 50 to 60 hits a day, and I’ve also gained more RSS readers as well. Which makes me a very “happy mama”.
I haven’t been working it as hard as I could though, so I’m sure the number would be a lot higher, if I did.
That is great news to hear Ruthie. So for you, using Entrecard is worth your time and effort? Do you think that you could get the same amount and effect of traffic if you were to just participate in StumbleUpon or Digg?
I’m sure I could. To be honest, I’m still very new to “blogging”, I’ve only be doing it for a about a year, and just started actively again for the past 3 or 4 months. So I really haven’t be using StumbleUpon or Digg that much. My sister keeps stressing how beneficial it could be, so I definitely plan to participate more. Things are a little overwhelming for me right now, I have a lot of projects going, and then “our” project coming up as well, and it’s tough for me to get focused on what I need to do next, if you know what I mean?
Okay, so as the original question asker I will chime in on the Entrecard thing. I have been using Entrecard for more than a month now. (Feb. 2 was when I placed the widget on my site.) From what I have gathered the traffic Entrecard sends is what I would call ‘Drive by Traffic”. Basically, these are other bloggers coming in to drop their cards to earn credits for themselves and then moving on. The bounce rates are huge and are the highest of any of the referring sites. Bounce rates of 85 to 91% and average page views of 1.1 to 1.3 is not what I call quality traffic. Compare that to StumbleUpon traffic to my site that has a 36% bounce rate, and a 1.8 page view average. StumbleUpon visitors spent an average of a minute and a half on my site while Entrecard visitors spent 13 seconds on average. I will admit that my Alexa rank has improved since using Entrecard but that may be a byproduct of my traffic has gone up across the board since February. I am planning on removing the widget on Sunday and seeing how things go without it. I will use BlogUpp in the same space Entrecard is currently using to see if there is a difference. Bottom line, Entrecard has not impressed me. The traffic it sends is “throw away” traffic from other bloggers looking to gain credits and not interested in your content.
I just ran the same data and my numbers compare to yours Dave. Numbers are not always what we think, that remark will probably give Garry a heart attack coming from me, lol…
Advertising is not always hits, clicks, bounces etc… A lot of advertising is branding and name recognition.
Most sites waste more space on their themes and headers than a 125×125 takes up, so even if the numbers are low, why replace it with nothingness? If you only have 125×125 space on your site to do something with, then I would certainly try something else. But if you have a lot of dead space on your header and/or sidebar I would think about the design aspect.
Now, with all that said I am going to continue to monitor. I know I have made a couple really good connections with Entrecard that can not be measured by the numbers, so I am probably a little biased at this point.
StumbleUpon has surprised me with how the traffic will linger, Digg continues to show that it is the real one hit wonder traffic of the web.
IMHO
The only real reason why I like Digg.com is the fact that you get a search engine friendly link back to your site or page that was Digg’ed. However, that page does get burried pretty quickly.
I am not so sold on Entrecard and fell that it doesn’t do justice having it on GCDC. Granted, I haven’t tried it like many of the people reading this post.
And David, I gave you a heart attack the other day, that would only be fair for you to give me one back.
Garry it is fine if you want to game alexa but the moment you stop dropping cards your ranking will nosedive instantly. The traffic is mostly useless for making money as it is nothing more than bloggers chasing bloggers and few ever stay and read a post – hence the 90% bounce rate. It will screw your ctr if using adsense. It is little more than a new version of the banner exchange programs of old.
If it is useful at all it would be as a convenient way to find a lot of blogs pertaining to whatever niche interests you but most of the members are beginners and the quality of posts are what you would expect – lots of articles about John Chow and entrecard itself.
From a social standpoint you can certainly meet a lot of people and someone such as yourself could probably increase your RSS substantially as experienced IMers are few and far between on the system and tend to stand out in the crowd. You will find dropping cards for the sake of dropping cards to be mind numbing and a huge waste of time but for people with no traffic I suppose 13 second visitors are seen as better than nothing.
I have noticed people’s enthusiasm for dropping cards has begun to wane now that they are realizing that the traffic isn’t producing anything substantial for them and it will likely go the way of Blog Rush soon enough.
LOL @ Blog Rush…
I remember them… ah, vaguely. Man things come and go quickly on the Net. Thanks for the awesome comment and wonderful insight on Entrecard. This is very detailed and somewhat even sounds predictable. The part you said about noobs writing about John Chow is hilarious because it is in many ways very true. I do have to admit though, I think John Chow carries a lot of knowledge. It can be hard to extract the hidden jewels from within his blog, but he does have some excellent posts.
For me, I think Entrecard is doing a good job at what it’s designed to do: bring people to your blog that might otherwise would have never known you existed. It’s a third and fourth source of traffic for me.
I’m not going to say that it’s necessarily high-quality traffic, but I have to believe that somewhere in there some people have decided to say, “Hey, cool blog” and decide to bookmark or subscribe to me.
On the other hand, I think a blogger has to work hard and spend time dropping cards on other blogs to improve their “value”, which in turn translates to more traffic because people want to advertiser on the “higher-priced” blogs. I once reached third in my category (blogging resources), but finally wore myself out trying to drop cards everywhere and buy ads. But I will get my second wind back.
I am taking entrecard for a test drive to see what they will do for me. I have only been a member for a couple of days but I am going to give it a week to see what it does. If Ii don’t like it by then i will remove it from my blog. I also plan to leave a comment on here telling you of my finding. wish me luck.