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I have posted a new contest in the forums and figured I would share with the rest of you who are just passing by. If you are interested in winning 2,000 Entrecard credits this Friday, just subscribe to my rss feed by email. Here is the link. I will be drawing the winner and announcing them on this blog. This is as easy as it gets for getting free credits. If you have already subscribed by email don’t worry you will be automatically entered into the drawing.

If you are not sure what Entrecard is or why you would want these free credits, go discover why at www.entrecard.com I will accept entries for the competition until noon this Friday. I will announce the winner at 5 p.m. CST.

If you are new to this blog and want 250 Entrecard Credits all you need to do is sign up for my RSS feed and comment here to collect your prize. What could be more simple than that? This offer is available to the first 10 subscribers.

I was one of the first few people to sign up with Entrecard before it spread to the pubic. In the last few months I have discovered some interesting marketing techniques and ideas surrounding Entrecard. I am not going to be able to post all the ideas in one blog post, so I will spread it out. I will focus on one main idea per post. Today, I am going to talk about credit give-a-ways.

People love free credits, and that is no lie. But, the number one thing people don’t want to do is figure out how to get those free credits you advertised in the forums. When I get to your site and have to read a long instruction list on how to receive the free credits, you have already lost me. Of course if you are offering a ton of free credits like 5,000+ then maybe I will devote a little more time to figuring it out.

This brings me to my first tip. When giving away credits, make it easy and fun. Nobody wants to decipher your blog enigma code in order to figure out how to score those credits. If you want RSS subscribers, say you will give 300 credits each to the first 10 RSS subscribers.

So, with that said, if you are in the market for 300 credits, simply subscribe to my RSS feed and comment that you did in this post.

To my surprise the second day of the experiment went better than the first. The biggest difference is that on the second day I spend no credits advertising the site. Referrals from Stumbleupon and Google search engines were both up. These combined netted over 712 visitors on day two. This experiment has brought in a total of:

• 1404 visits
• 2607 pageviews
• 3:06 average time on the site

Conclusion: I was not sure exactly how day two would go seeing that I did nothing more to promote the site. I think this changes the numbers even more from the last post in regard to the value entrecredits. Using entrecredits as a bartering tool for such things as having people stumble, digg or comment on your blog has proved to be a lot more valuable than spending the same amount of credits on advertising your advert.

Note to self: Before ruling out the value of advertising make sure to advertise on a blog with over 1,000 RSS  subscribers and compare.

Question: What successes have you had with people stumbling and digging your articles?

Yesterday, I ran an experiment using Entrecard and entrecredits. Call it a new marketing idea. I wanted to see if it would be better to use Entrecredits for comments, diggs, stumbles, shop items and rss subscriptions than it would be to purchase adverts space on other blogs. Here are my results from the experiment on our other blog ThatMutt.com along with my conclusion. All of this was done on the very first day of promotion and the first full day the blog was online. The site was only active for about 15 hrs prior to starting my new idea and was receiving no outside traffic at all.

• RSS subscriptions = 4
• Stumbles = 7
• Comments = 6
• Diggs = 2 with 2 comments

All of the above really doesn’t seem like a lot of activity on a site and by no means is. But just that little bit of activity was able to net, according to Google Analytics;

• 692 visits
• 1,296 pageviews
• 1.87 page/visit
• 44.22% bounce rate
• 3:23 ave. time on site

Not bad for the first day on the job. All of that cost roughly 1,275 entrecredits. I purchased each of the items through the entrecard shop. I don’t expect that I could do that every day. Perhaps I could do it once a week as a traffic boost infusion to the site. I received nearly 555 visits yesterday attributed to Stumbleupon and Digg. Yesterday was also the highest number of card drops and advert clicks received on that blog totaling 48 hits (according to Google analytics not Entrecard). We had 3 ads running yesterday totaling about 280 credits.

Results: By my calculations for credits spent and number of visits received. It would take roughly 3000 credits of advert purchases to equal the same number of visitors from Stumbleupon and Digg. Another major difference between the two ways of driving traffic was the average time spent on the blog. Stumbleupon delivered and average time over 2:04 minutes. Entrecard users average time on site was just over a 1:02 minute.

Conclusion: I think that Entrecard is providing a great service and an amazing way of interacting within the blogging community. As well as allowing for an other form of exchange medium (entrecredits). Entrecredits have made for a great bartering tool allowing for the purchase or exchange of services, time or favors. Tell me about some of the interesting ways you have spent your entrecredits.