I wrote a post about signing up with Entrecard a week or so ago… whilst it seemed like a good idea at the time, I’m slowly starting to think that, well - it’s a waste of time; a few other bloggers feel similar judging by what I read across the blogosphere.

Entrecard is great - if everyone uses it in a way that is beneficial to both parties (the blog that you are dropping a card on and yourself, of course). Now, the thing Entrecard does is get you to visit other blogs - ones that you may not have seen prior; I’ve found quite a few decent ones this way like Toni Turner (someone that’s ahead of Problogger and competing with John Chow at the top of the Make Money Online category), Bankruptcy to Millionaire, Bloggin-ads and a few others… those are a few of the blogs that I’ll do a checkup on every so often to see what they’re saying - I’ve also come across a load of shitty ones, but heck - I come across those anyways. Now, when I drop a card, I make sure to take a quick look around at the site - read the first article (and if it’s an interesting one, post a comment) and make a mental note whether I’ll be coming back or not. Nothing wrong with that, right? That was, I presume the purpose of Entrecard - to allow bloggers to find other blogs that they hadn’t known about before, and hopefully build relationships. If I think a blog is crap, I won’t visit it again, simple as - I’m sure most people will do the same.

The problem with any community is that you will always have your fair share of idiots - there are people that use Entrecard just to drop cards, and a lot of them at that. Now, there are idiots asking for an increase on the current limit of 300 a day - if you’re one of them, for shame. Dropping three f**kin’ hundred cards a day means that you’re probably not reading a lot, if anything on the blogs you’re visiting - I wouldn’t visit 300 blogs in a day and I doubt the people asking for a limit are properly visiting them either. As someone smartly calculated in the thread, even at three clicks a minute (a mere twenty seconds on each blog) that would be an hour and forty minutes of your time - I’d doubt that the idiots amassing 300 credits a day would even spend twenty seconds. It is people like that that ruin innovative ideas - and seeing that there are quite a lot of them, my feeling about Entrecard are growing less and less positive.

Yes, I will not deny that I have received a decent amount of traffic - 253 clicks direct from Entrecard to me, while I’ve received 20 clicks from ads I’ve placed - however, how much of that is useful traffic? Quantity does not always equal quality - I’d rather have ten visitors that turned out to be recent contributors (in terms of being active on the blog - comments and debating) over 253 visitors that brought out only five such people. For me, the majority (and by majority, I mean like 95%) of the traffic I’ve received from Entrecard is ‘junk traffic’ - I can only count maybe one person who has become a commentator here directly because of Entrecard, and even he isn’t too regular.

It seems that I’m not alone that Entrecard is slowly losing the buzz it had when it started out - two posts I’ve come across convey similar feelings. For a hilarious understanding of how bad the card droppers could become, read Can’t Get Rich’s post comparing Entrecard droppers to Warcraft credit farmers or Blogger Unleashed’s post on how badly Entrecard Sucks. A simple Google search will reveal quite a few more posts like that - the only reason I didn’t post more examples was because, well - the above two posts say it fine.

So that’s the card dropping idiots out of the way. The next point I’m going to make is directly related to that though, so don’t worry; it tears the promise that Entrecard made to shreds. One thing that Entrecard promised was the ability to advertise on the ‘bigger’ blogs - the likes of John Chow, Problogger et all. Whether or not you agree with their styles, one thing is for sure - they get a sh*tload of traffic, and better yet, RSS subscribers. The two aforementioned bloggers have around 15,000 and 30,000 RSS subscribers respectively, so they must be doing something right - heck, even if 5% of those visit your site, you’ll be happy - right?

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The problem with this theory is that everyone figured out you could advertise on the ‘bigger’ blogs, and thus the idiotic card droppers I spoke about earlier have knicked places for the maximum alloted time. Take a look at the above picture of the ‘most expensive’ Entrecard users - I’ve highlighted all of the blogs I wouldn’t mind advertising on (as they relate to my niche). What do they have in common? They’re all full, and that to - for the next ten days. I did manage to knick advertising on Tyler Cruz (December 9th!) and currently have an ad pending for Day Job Nuker, but I have over 500 credits spare - none of which will be going to good use anytime soon. I will wait a couple of weeks and see how it does, but if it continues in this manner you will not see Entrecard on TUK anymore; that space could be better used for something else (like this picture, for example). How about you - do you think that Entrecard still has life in it, or that it’s basically a load of shit? Let me know.

To ‘celebrate’ this post I’ll be giving out 500 credits - I don’t really use them so someone that’s more into the system might as well. Just comment on this post below to stand a chance to win.

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