If you haven’t been using EntreCard to promote your blog, you’re probably missing out on one of the best tools bloggers have to garner short bursts of traffic on a regular basis. Sure, there are detractors who will say EntreCard turns only traffic with a high bounce rate and most people visiting a site from EntreCard are only visiting sites to drop cards and earn credits. However, in my experience, regardless of how traffic is generated, whether it be from EntreCard, MyBlogLog, StumbleUpon or even organic SEO, there will always be a significant bounce rate and a lower percentage of visitors who remain on a site more than a few minutes.
That being said, my philosophy is “all traffic is good traffic” and for the most part, EntreCard does have a developing community of supporters who genuinely visit other community members’ sites and participate, not just bounce. If I can get one out of one hundred visitors from any traffic source to hang around long enough to read a few articles and leave a single comment or subscribe to my RSS feed, that’s a positive.
Now that I’ve given my reason for having the EntreCard widget on the sidebar of this blog, it’s time to get to discussing EntreCard’s “economy”, which is undergoing several critical changes that will impact the community. Here’s the latest update from EntreCard :
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In order to continue operating in the long-term, Entrecard needs make some significant changes. These are summarized below:
1. Buy credits for less: Entrecard is now selling 1,000 credits for $6.00. You can buy them here: http://entrecard.com/r/buy_credits We really do believe that an economy with plenty of 3rd parties involved is a stronger economy overall, unfortunately just right now we’re unable to support that given the need to keep everything running. We hope that, by taking the steps we have, we will be able to reach a good balance between maximizing the overall benefits for our users and getting the revenue we need to pay the bills and expand the service. Hopefully, in the future, we’ll be in a stronger position with a more diverse income and we’ll be able to reintroduce independent credit sales and unfettered credit transfers among members. We appreciate all the feedback we’ve had over the past few days on this topic, please let us know what you think by leaving a comment on our blog post here: Changes affecting the Entrecard economy Thanks for standing by us while we make these important changes, and know that these changes will allow us to continue to make available to you the great Entrecard service that brings you more traffic, comments, and subscribers and better rankings. |
I’ll play devil’s advocate here and bring my economics background into factor to question exactly how EntreCard feels that their credit system is in fact an economy? If you have any experience in the field, you know that for an economy to exist, free enterprise must exist. In #3 above, cutting off the free enterprise system by disallowing members from selling EntreCard credits amongst themselves literally devalues EntreCard credits alltogether. Can you imagine if any government said that citizens were no longer allowed to sell gold or silver and that all gold would be sold by the government alone? Free enterprise sets a market value for a commodity and a governing body controlling all sales of a particular commodity is not an economy, it’s a totalitarian state.
Transfer tax ??? While I’ve never bought or sold credits, nor have I ever had the intention of doing so, this announcement seems more based on greed than anything else. Considering the lack of free enterprise, a tax on a valueless commodity is essentially a handling fee, not a tax. One thing I particularly dislkie is overinflating of credit based systems and for all it’s worth, if EntreCard is going to be the sole distributor of credits, they have essentially become just another traffic exchange like TS25, Traffic Pods or Trafficera (all of which are very good sources of traffic).
Once again, I’m not a member of the EntreCard community for reasons other than to network and generate traffic to my blogs so none of these changes impact nor bother me. I am merely offering my opinion on these changes in economic terms and reiterating that for any economy to thrive, free enterprise must be a factor. I’m not the only one who thinks so, Jeff at Buzz My Blog has weighed in with his article, EntreCard Changing the Rules - Too Little Too Late? and Jude8573 at Beauty Denominator has been put in a bind by the New EntreCard rules regarding 14 transfers per week.
Possibly these changes are due to EntreCard’s owner, Graham Langdon trying to sell the site at SitePoint within the last week but most likely it is due to Graham feeling the stress of operating a startup venture on a shoestring budget.
If you have an opinion on Entrecard’s recent changes, please feel free to leave a comment.
I have given up on Entrecard a while back because of too many Indonesian and Phillipine bloggers who have spam blogspot blogs with junk clouding the system.
I agree with you that EC is good for a quick burst of traffic and to help your Alexa rankings.
I love using Entrecard to help my SERP’s, but have heard that traffic generators break the AdSense TOS. Does Entrecard break any rules?
What’s been entertaining at times is to see the images bloggers use for their EntreCard. Some go for the male audience (you know what I mean), and others wisely make a grabbing headline - a strong advertisement. Eitherway, if it’s working for you - making you money - keep doing it.
Fantastic post! I’m new to blogging amd posts like this help up enormously. I’m off to join EC. :-)
I had Entrecard for one of blog but way too much spam so I got rid of it.
How did you get spam from Entrecard ? I’m confused ?
strange thing are goin on w/ Entrecard. last blog post they made was try to get us to buy OIOpubliher in their ref link so we sell ad on our blog for EC credit?????
What good do EC credits do if you can no longer sell them?? I want $$$ for my ad space not EC credits.
I never heard of this system before but I will now be joining if it really can get me some traffic. Thanks
well before using this Ec thing i had a gud amount of traffic as well but alexa ranking bothered me great way but this EC thing really helped
Entercards bring spam. I also had them on my blogs but it was terrible.
who have spam blog spot blogs with junk clouding the system.
I am big fan of entrecard. it rocks
The quality of Entrecard traffic for me has always been decent but then again I suppose my content must appeal to the Entrecard audience. I do think some of the changes being made are a bit odd and might not really help users in the long run but if it is truly what Entrecard needs to do to keep the site running, I guess I support it.
I stopped using entrecard now. Tired to do the dropping everyday. No dropping, no traffic. I’m now looking for other way to generate traffic to my site.