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Cards, cards, everywhere. If you’ve bought a Monopoly set in the past year, you may have been surprised to see that the traditional funmoney has been replaced by a Monopoly Visa card and calculator – no more stealing other people’s banknotes and hiding them under the board. Doh! In spite of our thieving ways, we like cards, so we pounced on this review request to take a look at Entrecard.
“Let your Entrecard introduce you,” reads the website. Ah ha. It all falls into place. Don’t let the fact that it sounds French put you off – these things are actually pretty cool. “Entrecard is an easy way to network with other blog owners.”
Take a look at our sidebar. You see the Entrecard section? We put that in a few days ago to give the Entrecard a test run. It’s a pretty simple concept: You sign up for an Entrecard account and get a bit of code to slap in your sidebar. You then have access to the wonderful world of 125×125-button exchanges.
Are you a blogger who has been considering selling ad units but you don’t have the traffic to actually make any sales? This is the next best thing and it could drive traffic to your blog – for free.
So how does it work? Well, the first thing to do after you’ve put the code on your blog is to set up your own Entrecard. You can choose your title, tagline and description. There are five preset buttons and you can also upload an image. Simple. Just choose a category for your blog, add your url and you’re away.
The next step is the fun part. Entrecard works on a credit system. You earn credits by networking with other bloggers and dropping your card in their widget. Reminds us of the time we went to Vegas and dropped our name card at Caesar’s Palace – we got to go backstage and meet Frank Sinatra, bless him. Anyway, once you’ve dropped your Entrecard in a blogger’s widget, that blogger gets a card in his or her inbox so that they can then visit your blog.
To get your card to show up on someone’s blog, you have to use some of your Entrecard credits to advertise in their widget. You set up a campaign, choose your niche, find a blog and then request an ad spot. If it’s approved, it runs for 24 hours.
These mysterious credits are earned one each when you drop a card or have one dropped on your blog. If someone advertises on your blog, you get paid in credits. The cost to advertise on a blog is equal to twice the number of Entrecards dropped on that blog each day. It’s all pretty straightforward.
A quick browse through all the blogs you can advertise on showed us that there are 112 people signed up so far, including our old buddy Shoemoney, our favorite baldie Neil Duckett and a bunch of other people. This thing is just getting started, but if Shoe is on it then we reckon it must be worth a look.
What’s that you say? It’s a bit like Blog Rush? Well, yes, it is rather similar, but it uses pictures and it’s a heck of a lot more fun and involving than Blog Rush. Entrecard is interactive and it’s more like a game than the Blog Rush links. You don’t need to worry about outbound links either because Entrecard works with javascript.
We’re giving Entrecard a try and we don’t see any reason why other people wouldn’t. At worst, you will get a few extra visitors to your blog and at best, you could see a sweet little spike in traffic. If you need any more convincing about Entrecard, here’s a pic of the Big Beef canoodling with the Entrecard girls at Blog World Expo (along with Graham Langdon, Entrecard CEO).
It’s too soon to say how useful Entrecard is, but we’ll have a follow-up report for you in a few days.
All this talk of cards reminds us that it’s nearly Christmas and we haven’t written any cards yet. We’re gonna get cracking with our Christmas cards and ask Momma Cow for a new Monopoly set from Santa. In the meantime, go and sign up for Entrecard and drop us your card!
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Who knew cows pounced?
Hmmm…. Sounds like a scavenger hunt. Track down all the blogs with the widget to try and rack up credits. *L*
I’m waiting for the advertising MMO…
“Congratulations, you’ve leveled up! You’re now a Level 6 Affiliate Marketer. You’ve gained the skill “Plausable Lie“. When you reach Level 20 John Cow might mention you on his blog!”
Who knows, it may work…but once the novelty has worn off, what are the chances it will become “just another widget”, without any real benefit gained? There should be enough of them soon to start having a widget of the month article.
Simon: If this does what it says it does, you’re basically going to benefit from the extra traffic that will keep flowing in by exchanging spots with other blogs. We don’t think it’s something that needs to rely on novelty.
It definitely increases traffic, lots of other entre card members stop by to drop their card each day.
its like blogrush then…
True, it is different in the respect that it adds the networking dimension. I guess I’ve become a little skeptical of all the different types of blog “link exchanges” that have sprung up lately. I’ve yet to be convinced that EntreCard will provide anything radically different, but I will reserve judgement until it has got some run time behind it.
I hope people will start uploading some more attractive cards than those I’ve seen left on the blogs of early adopters.
It brought a LOT of traffic to my site. Since I was one of the first members to Entrecard, I was able to take the full potential of the program. As you can see, I’m right next to the Shoe…so yea
-Mike
It’s been working good for me. I’m going to have my ad on ShoeMoney’s site tomorrow for FREE!
It certainly brings traffic, and a pretty high bounce rate for people hell bent on collecting credits. I am looking forward to what this does turn into as I am sure it is not limited to it’s current form…
Interesting. I’ll have to give it a try.
Always looking for ways to increase traffic without spending a dime.
Pretty nice, I’ll try it then
I signed up for it since I took blogrush off my blog. I don’t like the way blogrush is manipulated and it wasn’t producing very good results for me. I like this system of dropping your card on sites that use entrecard. very cool.
i saw this the other day but forgot to sign up, still thinking about it.
Yes, the bounce rate is pretty high but the first time I drop my card, I do make an effort to read what they have to say.
If I forget that I’ve already visited them the second time around, I’ll do a drive by dropping - erm, that didn’t sound right.
Hey, at least I got there and gave them a chance to impress me.
I had a free ad on shoemoney the other day. I got 100 clicks! Entrecard is WAY better than blogrush and I would recommend it to everyone
those girls are well endowed!
Is that u in the pic cow?? Looks alot like your logo character!
I really like the Entrecard. I was getting all these credits on Blogrush, but I was at a loss as to what to do with them. This new one is so much more useful, I’ve discovered at least 4 new blogs for my blogroll from looking at the other joined sites that appealed to me, and got my frog stack pictured here and there. I also wrote a thing about it pinging back to you. I see you got it. I love how all the pings and things say the pinger is from the UK and using WordPress. Thanks for putting up that post!
so far so good with this one.
Great find. Lets see how it works. I have added it to my website.
Any other tips……
My link bait
http://www.dnxpert.com/2007/11/21/how-to-get-your-ad-on-shoemoney-for-free-within-15-minutes/
has upset Shoemoney so much he removed the widget from his site
John: Actually it probably did. We got an angry email from Jeremy!
But i don’t see find anything wrong in your post. Just not relevent to your blog topic but drive “abundance” and help a select group of users find coherence and simplicity in the midst of that abundance.
Anf if Jeremy does it. Well…
Lol, well what does he expect?? Celebrity status without the occasional linkbait :)?
I mean you make fun of John Chow all the time… he is probably pissed…. but he also gets traffic from you… and in the end, who cares what anyone thinks lol.
That’s fair. Does it in fact matter, who gets traffic from whom.
I think we should all more concern on attracting visitors of your esteem.
thanks for the info
Very nice widget but is there any referral programs coming out soon?
haha, I will try it!
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I signed up!
But found immediately afterwards that the algorithm of price has changed!
I can not advertise anywhere with my credit.
Blog network used to all about helping each other ….
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