Entrecard
First of all, many of the “top” Entrecard sites rely almost 100% on Entrecard traffic. Not all of them, just most of them. Entrecard traffic is so poor, it’s almost not worth having. This is the main reason you will see me drop off in the listings on Entrecard and then bounce back up every once in awhile. Sometimes I feel like I want to meet other bloggers out there and have them visit my site.
Over time, I have found a few people that do visit my blog even when I don’t drop. This is a very small number though. Most of my comments come from Entrecard as they are ready to drop them every once in awhile. My traffic from the search engines is pretty silent. I know they’re there because they make me money. Yea, they’re the ones clicking through my targeted ads you see here. I didn’t just throw them up for no reason, they’re targeted for the search phrases bringing this site traffic.
Back to Entrecard. They’re drop and go traffic mostly, and yea more active on the comment side. They view one page and leave. I have monitored my search engine traffic however and they generally explore a few pages before leaving.
So which one is higher quality? Obviously the search engine traffic is higher quality, and more interested in my site overall, even though they’re not comment happy like Entrecard. Most of the comments are just to get extra traffic to their site or free advertising. I’ve had a lot of requests from members of Entrecard to commit click fraud. Perhaps they don’t understand that the ads on my site are not click based. Except for the in-text advertising from InfoLinks. I don’t get why they would even want to do this since it’s only about $.02-$1 or something.
However, there is a plus side to Entrecard, you get to meet bloggers from all around. It’s kind of interesting, but most of them are after monetizing their blog and that doesn’t happen unless you have TARGETED traffic. Just throwing junk traffic at advertisements is not going to work. I don’t care how much traffic you throw at them, it’s not going to work. Targetted traffic is 1000X more valuable for monetization even if you only have say 10unique a day from a keyword. However, Entrecard is a bloggers paradise so perhaps you could try to advertise something related to blogging. The issue is that 80% or so don’t even stop to look at your site to even notice the advertisement since they’re in “drop mode”.
Adgitize
A possible monetization strategy, however I have made barely anything from this program, and to tell you the truth if I could rank for another “money” keyword I’d make 100X the amount I make from Adgitize. It’s almost worthless as far as monetization goes. Why do I keep it up? I know a lot of bloggers use this service so I’m being nice
It’s another generator of basically “garbage” traffic. Not targeted, just someone thinks your logo looks neat, clicks it and then leaves most likely. It’s a waste of time and effort to bother with this too much, unless you’re just looking for a few comments here and there.
ProjectWonderful
Again, by me running this advertisement service I’m just being nice. It costs $.10 cents a day to advertise on my blog is that too much? It seems so. Every once in awhile I see an advertisement show up, but not very often. The Internet marketing side of me thinks this could be a cheap way to get clicks to offers by sneaking around the sites Alexa page to see what keywords it’s ranking for and what kind of offer/landing page I could promote on these websites
Haven’t tried it yet, but I’ll get to it eventually. Lot cheaper than Adwords, but then again I have to figure out the targeting/keywords by hand and come up with an appropriate advertisement for the offer/landing page.
I haven’t seen anyone do this yet which is surprising, maybe I’m letting out a secret by mentioning this.
Conclusion
If you want to make money with your blog, you have to rank for keywords and insert appropriate advertisements. For this blog, I only promote products I support fully. I’m not even specifically targeting keywords, I just look to see what comes up and what is possible to monetize, what’s more I’m directing them to what they want anyway so I’m helping them while they help me. Nothing bad about that at all.
If you want just random comments from other people that own blogs or possibly some readership by all means use Entrecard, Adgitize, and ProjectWonderful. It’s also somewhat useful for link building to be part of the Entrecard community. Sort of an easy “fast start” to get your site indexed and grab some backlinks. I fully support EC in that nature. It’s very good for that. I think this site still needs more backlinks but I have too many projects to focus soley on SEO for this website.
Most of this is from an Internet Marketers point of view, and maybe not towards someone that just enjoys blogging and comments. So it’s not really “junk” traffic if you’re just looking for that. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy blogging obviously or else I wouldn’t be posting here all the time. I also enjoy having contact with some of my readers.