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Site Tweaks Part 1 - Entrecard

This is the first of a five part Site Tweaks series. I’d been wanting to improve the popularity of my site, and the series covers five of the things that I’ve tried to do just that.

I’d recently joined up to Twitter, and one of the tweets I received from Reena was regarding her using Entrecard. I did a bit of research and found that Entrecard is a money-free way for bloggers to advertise their site. It works like this:

  • You’re given some initial Entrecard Credits.
  • You earn credits when you “drop” on an Entrecard widget on someone else’s site.
  • You earn credits when someone drops on the widget on your site.
  • You earn credits when someone wants to advertise their site the widget on your site.
  • You spend all these credits on advertising your site on someone else’s widget on their site.

There is also an Entrecard Shop where you can buy all manner of things (from website designs, to t-shirts, eBooks, etc) with your credits. Other users treat it exactly like currency, and offer it as prizes in competitions, or for those who are their “top droppers” for a particular month.

The widget is a piece of JavaScript that any owner of a website can add to their page. As this site runs from WordPress, I just added the snippet of code to the sidebar, so it’s always visible.

My Entrecard Drops

My Entrecard Drops

You can drop your card 300 times per day, a maximum of once per day per site. This involves you being logged into Entrecard, then going to another users site, where there widget will now say “Drop”. I had an initial splurge on the first couple of days, and dropped over 200. I did get some reciprocal drops in return indicating that users were visiting my site, even if they weren’t reading much on it. This highlights one of the fundamental issues with Entrecard - those that might be termed spam droppers. They show up on your site, find your widget, drop their card, and away they go. The Entrecard site says something about it being an opportunity for readers to find sites they like, and to continue reading it in the future, rather than just being an advertising medium.

I then had a period where I didn’t drop as many (see my drop chart), and I felt that all the work I’d put in previously for Entrecard was a bit wasted. I hadn’t yet started advertising on other people’s widgets so I wasn’t sure what traffic this would bring.

Clicks on my advert

Table of clicks on my advert, and the cost per click

Since then, I’ve had my widget appear on other sites, and yes, Entrecard, if nothing else, brings traffic. As you can see from the figures, some sites were much better at bringing a few people over than others (although, as with any statistics, these can be easily manipulated by other users).

The really valuable thing to consider however, is the number of visits vs the cost of the advert. The cost of adverts work on a power of 2 line. So a site with no other adverts queued up costs 2 credits. If it already has one advert showing (each advert lasts for 24 hours), then the cost to add your ad to the queue is 4. If there’s 2 adverts, then your cost is 8, and so on. I find the cost for others to advertise on my site sit at around 32 or 64 credits, meaning there’s 5-6 days of adverts constantly in my queue. It also means that the number of credits I have goes up by 32 or 64 each day, even if I don’t drop on other widgets, and if no-one drops on mine. Some users though are earning 1024 or 2048 credits for each advert they show!

As for getting the most out of it, I came up with my top 8 factors that affect how successful an Entrecard campaign is. I can say for certain that Entrecard is making the number of unique visitors jump up by about 20%. How targeted these visitors are, how interested they are in my site, and how likely they are to continue reading other articles is questionable.

I get the feeling that to really make Entrecard work for you, you need to spend a little bit of time every day doing drops, than do a huge number of drops one one or two days, then nothing for the rest of the week. Currently, whilst personal life is busy, I can’t really justify spending that time as I’m not as committed a blogger as others are. If my advert queue dropped to 16 or 8 credits, then I’d probably do stuff to boost my visibility with Entrecard users, to restore the plateau I’m happy with.

2008 09 26 Entrecard
Site Tweaks Comments (3) Also tagged , , Popularity: 66%

Top 8 factors for your Entrecard campaign

I’d bought some Entrecard ads on other sites recently, but didn’t get many clicks from them. I sat down and worked out what the reasons could have been and came up with a few ideas. Here are a list of factors that you should consider, to help reduce the cost-per-click and increase how successful your campaign is:

  1. Position on the screen - If their website has the widget “below the fold” (meaning a user has to scroll down to see it), then your advert is less likely to be seen. Try and advertise on those sites where the widget is close to the top, usually top left or top right.
  2. Speed of the site - Some users are only there to drop cards, and will only re-visit sites they know are fast loading, at least for the EC widget part. If you can find out which of the sites are fast loading, and get an advert on there, then your advert will be seen by many more people.
  3. Neighbouring Elements - Even if the widget is situated near the top of a fast loading page, if it’s surrounded by other adverts, or is hard to distinguish from other attention-grabbing elements on the site, then your advert is less likely to be noticed. Pick a site to advertise on where the EC is their main (only?) form of advertising, so that your advert will stand out more.
  4. Popularity of the site - This can be tricky to measure. On EC itself, the popularity for a site is defined by how many drops the site received the previous day. Great, you think, lets advertise on the one with the highest number of drops! Be aware however that drops can only be done by other EC users; a non-IT-related non-blogging site with a low EC popularity, may actually have considerably more visitors to their site than a blogging site - it’s just that the latter has a higher percentage of visitors from the EC community. Of course, if your own site is about EC, then the above reasoning is annulled.
  5. Cost of the advert - A more expensive may lead to a few more clicks, but the real value is in the cost-per-click table you can find on the Statistics page of your EC account. I’ve yet to establish with buying lots of cheap adverts that may get a couple of clicks each is better value for credit than splashing out on a more expensive advert to get a whole load of clicks. Either way, just remember that a more expensive advert only means it already has more adverts lined up. You may do well to watch the cost of an advert on your chosen site over the course of a week or two, to see what the high and low values of it are, then buy an advert when it hits a low again.
  6. Cost per popularity - One of the things I started checking was that you can high EC popularity sites, with low advert costs. Taking the above points into account, this means you can find a site that has lots of droppers, but won’t cost a lot for you to advertise on. I took a very rough ratio of 4:1 - if the popularity of the site was over 4 times the cost of the advert, then this was definitely worth looking into. Of course, if other factors make the site suitable to place an advert there, then a smaller ratio would be fine. You can find these good deals by searching for cheapest, setting your maximum, then ordering by most popular first.
  7. Your advert - Quite simply, if your advert looks interesting, and catches the attention of the reader, then they are more likely to click on it. Lets just say that an image of an attractive looking female will probably grab the attention of the majority of male readers.
  8. Topic of the site - Advertising your gardening blog on a site about computer games probably isn’t going to be targeting your potential readers very well. Some people prefer to advertise on a variety of sites, whilst others prefer to only target comparable sites within their own topic. Remember that advertising on a site that is about Entrecard itself, is one way of targeting other EC users.
2008 09 10 Entrecard Comments (5) Also tagged Popularity: 58%