What is Entrecard?

Those bloggers who keep one ear on the internet's grapevine will have no doubt heard about the new blog promotion technique: Entrecard. Bloggers from all sorts of niches have quickly jumped on board, to receive a quick boost to their traffic and Alexa rankings. Although Entrecard has received many criticisms, it can't be denied that no traffic is bad traffic, and for a quick registration process that gives a blogger another tradeable it's worthwhile.

Entrecard is, in effect, a means of leaving your business card at any blog (or blog-related site) that you have visited. A widget (basically a sidebar add-on) is displayed somewhere on your site. To leave someone your blog's Entrecard, you click on the 'drop yours' button at the bottom of their widget. This earns you, and them, a credit.

You can spend your credits to advertise on other people's widget, and you can earn credits by allowing people to advertise on your widget. You receive only a fraction of your widget's cost, to reduce inflation in the Entrecard system, but if you are a busy dropper then you can still earn a lot of credits this way. The cost to advertise on your widget is determined by how many card drops you make each day. So, if you read lots of blogs and drop them your card, then an Entrecard will suit you.

The Entrecard system does have a few distinct disadvantages though. The biggest one is if you own multiple blogs, you can only have one blog per Entrecard account. You can still make multiple accounts, but you can only log in and drop cards from one account at a time. Consequently, if you do have multiple Entrecard accounts, then one tends to become your main account, and the others become rarely used and neglected.

The other Major criticism of the Entrecard system is that the quality of the traffic is low, as so many card droppers will visit a blog with the single intention of finding the widget, dropping the card, and not reading anything before moving onto the next blog. This behaviour is known as chain-dropping. Despite all the complaints, if your blog has catchy titles, a good layout and interesting content then you can convince a chaindropper to stay a while and actually read. After all, even chain-droppers need a break at some point. In my experience there are several other Entrecard users that regularly visit my blog to drop cards. They may not comment very frequently, but I can be fairly confident that they enjoy the blog based on their returning visits.

Your are more likely to get regular readers from the same niche that your blog is in, and in the early stage some Entrecard categories are still quite small. As the system ages, I believe that there will be more blogs under each category, and it will be a fairly good system to bring blog owners of the same topics together and increase publicity as a group.

So what are you waiting for? Sign up and start earning yourself some credits!