Random Blatherings

What is it?

Entrecard is a great way to get some free advertising for your blog. In exchange for some daily input, you have access to advertising space on a huge amount of blogs. And it’s completely free! It never costs you a cent.

How does it work?

Nothing in life is free. Entrecard doesn’t cost you money, but it does cost you some time. And like most things, you only get out what you put in. In this case, what you put in are “card drops”. If you look at the Entrecard widget above, you’ll see an advert, and a yellow box underneath that says “drop”. Once you sign up at Entrecard.com, you’re given the ability to drop 300 cards every day. If you want to drop 300 cards, you have to visit 300 different blogs. Each card you drop earns you 1 Entrecredit (1ec). You can use these ec’s to buy advertising space on another blog, which will hopefully send some traffic your way. Obviously, buying advertising space on highly visited blogs increases the chances that someone will visit your advert and find your blog. However, the best blogs to advertise on are often also the most expensive blogs to advertise on - 256ec, 512ec, 1024ec, and more - which means that it’s imperative you drop as many cards as possible in a day if you want to advertise on the big blogs. The other way you can earn credits is by allowing people to advertise on your blog. Once you’ve added the widget code to your website, users can apply to advertise on your blog. The price for advertising on your blog is determined by how many adverts you have waiting. The more adverts in your queue, the better, as people will have to pay more, earning you more ec’s.

What happens after I sign up?

Once you’ve created an account, make sure to add the widget code to you a prominent place on your site ASAP. You’ll probably get a huge influx of people requesting to advertise on your blog. Go through the list, and allow those you want, and disallow those you don’t want. There’s no obligation to accept any advertising requests at all. Also, ensure that you have a good advert. If you don’t have mad Photoshop l33t skillz (like me), check out this guy - he’s selling Entrecard-suitable adverts for just $6! And he does good work, too. Check out some of the previous adverts on his site. All that’s required of you after that is to start dropping cards. How many a day you drop is entirely up to you, be it nil or three hundred. Entrecard is a fantastic way to get some traffic to your blog, and a great way to find new interesting blogs. But it does require some work. It’s free $-wise, but it costs in time. How much time depends on you. I spend 30-45 minutes a day dropping and arranging adverts, and I get about 200 visitors a day from it. Quite a nice ROI. At the very least, give it a try. If you don’t like it, you haven’t lost anything.

———- If you’ve enjoyed this article, you might find some of the other’s I’ve written on the same subject enjoyable too. Please consider rating this article with Buzzfuse. Just click the widget above, and then click on a star. It will only take a moment. I’d also really appreciate you dropping your card below, or even linking back to this page - http://www.randomblatherings.com/blog/entrecard-a-beginners-guide/. If you have any comments, feedback or questions, please leave a comment on this post.