The Constant Cynic

This isn't really related to current events, but I wanted get this information out there.

I'm sure that through your travels through the blogosphere, you've seen numeroues entrecards along with the "U Drop, I Follow," or "U Drop, I Link," or "U Drop, I Comment." Maybe you started thinking what is this entrecard? Well here's a quick explanation.

People can put a card on their site. If someone drops a card of them (1 per day), they each get 1 credit. The concept is that whoever drops the card with read some of your posts and hopefully comment. You can see who dropped on you, so you can drop back on them and hopefully you will read their posts as well.

The main purpose of credits is to "rent" out someone else's card with your advertisement.You can also use credits to buy many things including advertising space, guest blogs, comments, and graphics from other people. You can drop 300 per day, so it takes a while to do all them. This makes people not read posts and just find the card to drop on. This makes time of the page low and bounce rate high.

I asked the same question on the Bloggeries forum. Here was my first impressiion. I've been dropping a lot and getting some drops back along with 1 or 2 comments. The impressions have also gone up a lot. The problem is that my bounce rate is at least 80%. This still seems to be the same case. I guess as long as I use entrecard, this will last.

Here are some of my later observations. The average time before I used entrecard was 52 seconds. Since i started using entrecard, it is 1 minute. Today I didn't post at all because I was really busy and I only have 19 seconds. I think that means I am getting lots of return readers.

So here are my final observations from today. I didn't drop at all today. The number of visits to my blog was about 30% lower and the bounce rate was 90%. The time on my site is 1 minute, but it was about 5 seconds  a few hours ago. That means no one read my blog. :( The same thing happened yesterday when I did drop so I think it just means that people read my blog in a very narrow timespan.

Here's a quote from EverythingEverywhere from the Bloggeries forum.

To get traffic, you must spend a lot of time dropping cards. In reward, you will get the same people over and over who visit your site, not to read your content, but just to drop cards. If you stop dropping cards, they will stop visiting. If Entrecard goes down, your traffic will disappear.

The problem with Entrecard is that it is an enormous time sink for the payoff. In the long run, you'd be better of trying to grow your traffic organically with people who actually care about what you have to say, than to go back day after day to get high bounce rate traffic that will disappear when you go on vacation.

Conclusion: Entrecard helps your traffic. You get return readers and more page visits. Your bounce rate will be higher, but the numbers are misleading because more people are going to your site. If you want to get the most benefits, you have to drop everyday to different sites. Entrecard is a decent way to promote traffic though it is not the best.