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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.

I like music. I am not a musician by any means and don’t know how to play any instruments, but I enjoy listening to music very much. Often times I use music as a form of motivation. In particular, I listen to techno, or more specifically, trance music. I find that listening to this music at a reasonable level increases my productivity.

Many studies have shown that listening to music does a number of different things, mostly contributing to the emotional state you are in. If you settle down to a nice dinner with your loved one and put on a soft melody, you will probably feel a lot more intimate than say listening to Metallica. As a matter of fact, there is a whole industry built around using music to build emotion. Just look at any blockbuster movie. When I find myself drifting into that afternoon haze, I will put together a nice little playlist to pep up my productivity. Here is a video of one favorite artist.

That video shows DJ Tiesto cut called Power Mix. With closed to 14,000,000 views on YouTube, there seems to be quite a large following. I haven’t seen him in concert, but I have seen similar.

I number one reason I prefer this genre of music over others while working is the lack of words. Instead of words, the primary focus is on the beat. Most trance music has an upbeat tempo that more or less energizes me. In college I would make the journey to the library to work on finals and papers. I would put together my list and away I would go. The funny thing about studying to music is the condition called same state learning, where you remember things the best in the same state of mind you learned them in. While writing an in-class final, I would constantly hear the techno beat playing in my head that I was listening to while studying. I often wondered if I would have done better on tests if I could have listened to music while taking them.

In the end, I am sure most people do choose their favorite music as a form of motivation. In Fargo, even the marathon won’t let you listen to music if you want to qualify for say the Boston marathon. I believe the race organizer’s reasoning is the disadvantage to others without the music motivation. Techno music is one of my productivity tools and if you haven’t used music as a form of motivation, I would highly recommend it.