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It is possible to achieve great traffic from Entrecard, and the best part is, it’s free. Okay, it is free if you feel like building networks and dropping Entrecards yourself, otherwise it will cost you a few bucks. What am I getting at here? I have been performing a little unofficial test on the best way to spend Entrecard credits for advertising on blogs. Of course, you could choose to spend all your credits on stumbles, Digg, or in the Entrecard shop or forum and could very well achieve more traffic. I am talking about using Entrecard for the core it was designed for, advertising on blogs.
The most beautiful part of the Entrecard model is the ability to advertise on other blogs for free and with little time invested. Dropping Entrecards and earning credits has become an art, and many people are becoming highly efficient at it, taking only 25-30 minutes to drop all 300 cards. For those who don’t know, you are limited to the number of “drops” you can do a day in order to keep ad-price stability in the system.
The number one goal when advertising on other people’s blogs is to receive the highest number of return clicks for the amount of credits spent. On the statistics page of the Entrecard account, there is a section that tells you how many credits it costs you to receive one click. The best possible result is to have return clicks to your blog cost less than 1 credit. None of my top ten returns cost me more than .9 credits per click. This means I am getting more than 1 visitor per credit to my blog. If I am able to do that with all 300 credits I can collect in one day, I could possibly have 300-400 visitors to my blog for 25 minutes of work. I don’t know about you, but this seems like a really good idea worth perfecting. If you get really lazy, you could buy the credits you spend and save even more time.
How do I select what blogs to post my advert on?
The secret is to select a blog that will provide you with more than one visitor per credit. Most of the blogs that will provide you more than one visit per credit are blogs with low advertising costs. I rarely advertise on a blog that costs more than 30 credits unless I know or really like the blog. If I want to advertise on blogs using 300 credits per day, those credits will go further if I advertise on blogs that cost between 2-30 credits. On average, 300 credits will allow me to advertise on 20-40 different blogs a day. Advertising on this number of blogs each day leads to some interesting results, mostly positive.
How do I pick the blogs?
When you go to the campaign tab on Entrecard, one of the options is to select “unseen” blogs, or blogs that you have not visited recently. I find all the blogs under 30 credits and advertise on all of them. Then I hit refresh and repeat the process until all my credits are gone. I do encounter some rejections advertising like this, but I get the credits back and typically if someone rejects my advert, he or she visited my blog, and I got one free visitor
. I think you are beginning to see the logic I am diving into. The idea in the stock market is to buy low and sell high. The same applies to Entrecard. An advert that costs you 2-4 credits to advertise on really has no way to go but up. When its advertising price goes up, more people are visiting the blog and therefore you end up with more than one visitor per credit spent.
In the Entrecard community, it is better to be on 50 blog in a day than two. For the same cost as advertising on some of the top blogs for a day, you could advertise on 20 smaller blogs and receive a better ROI (return on investment). I have never received as good of ratio advertising on the higher priced blogs than I have the lower cost blogs. Take this marketing idea and run with it. You’ll thank me later.
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Tags: Advertising, Entrecard, Entrecredits, Marketing Ideas

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Well, now the cat is out of the bag! LOL I’ve been using this approach myself, although I can’t lay claim to as good of ROI as you have.
Debt Free Revolution’s last blog post..Links and a Podcast Interview
Awesome read! Josh our thinking is very close, though we do have a slightly different strategy. You’re right on with this insight!
Stumbled and reviewed!
@Debt: I know, I know. I might be giving away to much good information for free, but I believe it only helps the community to promote the smaller blogs.
@Blogzilla: One of my favorite sayings is great minds think alike.
I do things somewhat differently from others but the Unseen tab is a nice feature. It keeps me updated with fresh blogs or sites to visit.
Melo’s last blog post..Extreme Dropping Or Extreme Gaming
Nice idea!
Thanks for the tips – I’ve been wondering how to make the most of Entrecard – I’ll give your method a try.
Nicola Pedley’s last blog post..Medium Day Bag from Karen Millen
great information for a newbie!
waterrose’s last blog post..Embroidery 101 – Tools: Needles
I’ve been doing a few other things as well as those mentioned above.
I added a widget on my site that shows my top 10 entrecard droppers. I’m hoping this will encourage more people to drop!
Also, when choosing who to advertise with, I do some research. It’s a bit time-consuming, but I have some ideas on how to automate it. I look at the website I plan to advertise on, and see the position of the widget. If it’s high up on the page, it’s a good candidate. Then, I look at if the site has a lot of traffic. You can advertise on somebody with very low credits and very high traffic (they might be new to EC, or they might not spend time dropping themselves). A good way to measure this is:
1. Check their alexa ranking
2. Check their google page rank
3. If they have any stats widgets on their page, sometimes you can click on it and get their # of visitors!
4. Check how many people are commenting on their articles (lots=good)
5. Check how recent their last article is (if it’s 8 weeks old, i doubt they are getting a lot of traffic)
6. Do a “link:” search on google, yahoo, msn to see if they have a lot of backlinks
By researching good sites, you can get way better “bang-for-your-buck” (or in this case, bang-for-your-credit). Sometimes I’ll find a golden nugget because advertising price has nothing to do with actual traffic. I actually recommend that EC change their ad value to match it, but until then, I’m gonna keep doing it this way.
Thanks! And visit my blog (duh)
Bill Stanley’s last blog post..By: Bill Stanley
@ Bill: I agree that researching the blogs before hand is quite important and agree with the 6 tips you posted. Although, for this experiment I advertised on every blog I could find under 30 credits. If I was going to shell out more than 30 per site I would at least like to know its in the same niche.
I been doing that lately too! I check recent and unseen tab to find some smaller blogs to advertise on.
MarketingDeviant’s last blog post..5 Ways to Leave a Great & Lasting Impression
Hey Josh thanks for this invaluable information.
Great advice. I’m doing most of that now. One other thing I do, is to go to the bottom of the category I want to advertise in. Some of these just joined, but their blogs are very popular. I then check the Pagerank and Alexa Rank on my Alexa tool bar. And then I look at the site a little.
Curt’s last blog post..DreamSuite For Photoshop by Auto FX
[...] Memo to Entrecarders: How to capitalize on Entrecard By: Josh Josh’s blog is a frequent read of mine. I came across this post on Entrecard and loved seeing what is a completely different way of doing the ads than I do. It’s great to see all the different ways people can use the advertising aspect of Entrecard. [...]
Thanks! I am so new to blogging and so new to entrecard that any info is good news to me. I’ll be giving all these tips a try.
Patsy
Patsy ( Patricia Sawyer)’s last blog post..The Invisible Man
@Patsy, Great to have you become a part of the blogging community and entercard.
@Curt, I agree completely with starting in your own category
Great mind indeed Josh, I just started doing this tonight. I do think the “unseen” is a little too untargeted tho.
Psst, a subscribe to comments plugin would do wonders
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..New Category – Marketing Contests
Thank you for posting this! It will certainly help a newbie like me
Joey’s last blog post..Cory is sick
People often underestimate the power of the little guy. Even the smallest blog has at least one reader — it’s author. And likely as not, they have at least a few readers, or friends that stop by once in a while. But people have these fantasies about getting attention from the bigger guys and thus tend to spend their credits unwisely.
Luke’s last blog post..Are You A Resourceful Person?