Even if this site did have traffic, again the income would be laughable. So eh… Entrecard is a good enough source of traffic to bring some readers I guess. It’s also possible I’ll get a few links for top dropper day or whatever, which will help SEO a little, anyway.

As I said, I do enjoy blogging about this and that here and there so that’s why the posts keep coming

Entrecard really doesn’t interest me anymore – I mean look at some of the top blogs on there they have some serious OCD over Entrecard. In my opinion, it’s like artificially inflating your stats. People are only subscribing and posting comments all the time because you’re on top of Entrecard. Would they be there if you stopped dropping and advertising on Entrecard? I doubt it. So these are in a way not real comments or subscribers

My plan is to let people become subscribers IF they want to, and comment IF they want to. I’m not DOING anything to get them to comment or subscribe. That’s the way I want it. I don’t have any dreams to become a “ProBlogger” or anything like that. I have no dreams of becoming rich off my blog either. Most of the people at the top of EC have that dream stuck in their head and can’t get rid of it.

Me, yea I make money online, but I do not make money from this blog. Well maybe a little, like $80/mo, nothing to brag about. Pays for my hosting and a little more so that’s great The real point here is – if you want to make money from your blog, don’t even bother with Entrecard. Search engine traffic is the only way you can monetize. Maybe possible if you’re really really sticking to a specific niche all the time and all your readers would be interested in all the products you’re talking about. It would have to be laser targeted though.

I’m not dropping Entrecard from the site yet, people can continue to advertise on my blog if they want

This graph shows pure search engine traffic from Google, mostly. I did go and check my ranks on certain keywords and they seem to have DROPPED. So, when I quit using Entrecard my search engine traffic shot up, and when I started again the search engine traffic shot down. I’m not sure why this would be caused merely by using EC or not using EC. Regardless, I know I have a long way to go before I really start to rank in the search engines.

If this is the way it works, I might as well get free traffic from the search engines rather than dropping 300 all the time to get the exact same amount of traffic. Also, the search engine traffic is of a higher quality, showing a 60% bounce rate, where Entrecard has an over 90% bounce rate.

My intentions were to stack the Entrecard traffic ontop of the search engine traffic, not to kill my better source of traffic!

So, I think I’m dropping entrecard. Sorry guys.

ExtremeTechie I may drop a little more, maybe 300 for a little while  since it’s just starting out, but I’m not too worried about traffic to this site anymore. I get some from search engines and advertising. Constant dropping of 300 cards a day is tiresome, and it provides very little good traffic to my site. I know a lot of people that now read my site came from EC, but I’m finding it’s just not worth it to stress over dropping all the time.

In due time I may completely drop EC from this site so I can use some other advertising. That might be awhile yet, and like I said I will continue to use EC, but not to the extreme extent I was.

I expect my popularity rating to plumet, but I don’t really care much, popularity rating really doesn’t mean anything.

A bigger reason is that I was finding dropping EC was taking up too much time, time that could have been spent blogging. So, I’m trading EC dropping for more posts on the site.

The thing is, I’ve seen blogs that are supposedly popular, and yet the site itself looks highly inactive That means that the only reason people are going there is for the all mighty widget, so they can drop.

I would like Entrecard to implement something like ProjectWonderful traffic stats. It’s pretty difficult to find out which sites are actually receiving traffic from other sources. Maybe I would like to advertise on a blog that’s not receiving all Entrecard traffic. It’s pretty difficult to find such a blog with EC’s current system. On top of that, the most popular blogs have an insanely high EC credit amount to advertise on, and it’s just not worth it to spend your EC there. In my opinion, you should stay below 512EC, but I’ve spent over a thousand EC on an advertisement before, just because I had extra credits and I didn’t know what to do with them. I suppose I should have gave them away

Choose wisely when advertising on Entrecard. In a way, you’re better off advertising on a ton of 2-32EC blogs, then ever bothering with the more popular ones. Unless you are trying to get your popularity rating up, advertising on the top blogs might get it up for you.

Entrecard’s system doesn’t work all that well, and that’s why a lot of people have dropped Entrecard and stopped using it completely.

You want to know the secret? THERE IS NO SECRET. Any site that says there is a “secret” is lying. How you get traffic is very obvious.

• ADVERTISING, ADVERTISNG, AND MORE ADVERTISING
• SEO – SEO is very important for driving targeted traffic to  your website, continuously. This is where quality content comes in. If you have good ranking in search engines, you’re all set. You won’t need to spend a dime. It’s very difficult to get good rankings, however and it’s best to start with ADVERTISING.
  

That’s about it. There’s no real “secret”. If you have a lot of money, it’s quite easy to setup a high traffic site. Right off the bat. Just use something like adwords. However, there are some services out there for those of us that don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on advertising.

• Entrecard – You’ve seen me talk about this before, it works to a certain point. I’ve gained some readers from this service You also get a chance to connect with a lot of different people that blog. You’re not alone. I say entrecard is worth it.
• Adgitize – I haven’t tried this personally, but I know it’s probably worth the $14 a month. I did some poking around in TechByPC’s traffic stats on ProjectWonderful, and I saw it definitely was hauling in some traffic. (TechByPC you can have me remove this if you want)
• ProjectWonderful – Cheap advertising, you just have to know how to work with the system. You can get 100s of clicks very cheaply if you know how to work with it. Finding sites that are within your target niche can be difficult. It’s best  to try and find new sites that were just listed that have high traffic – ads are very cheap at that point.

You see ads on my site. I’m not doing this to annoy you. I’m not doing this to make money. So why are they there? They’re there for my own advertising. I can make a very small amount from having these ads there (except entrecard) and that money goes to advertising for this site.

Conclusion

Getting traffic can actually be quite easy. If you have thousands of dollars laying around you don’t know what to do with. I notice that a lot of blogs exist only because they’re trying to make money. I hope they’re ready for disappointment, because to make money you have to have traffic, and to have traffic you have to spend money.. Yea it doesn’t make much sense. Let me know if I missed anything. I know this isn’t on topic very much, but when you’re trying to promote a site all the time you blog about it as well.

NoScript

NoScript is a plugin for FireFox that blocks all scripts on pages. You have to disable script blocking on entrecard.com and amazonaws.com

Next, you have to MAKE SURE that temporarily allow top-level sites by default is clicked. It was blocking entrecard still and I wondered why, this option makes that problem go away.

Firefox Settings

Go to Tools>Options>Content and add exceptions entrecard.com and amazonaws.com to the “Load images automatically” option. Then disable that optioin. Also uncheck “Enable Java”.

Linky

Linky is a plugin for firefox that allows you to select links from a page. First, what I do is go into my drops inbox and select all the people who have dropped me. Then I use linky to open all selected links in tabs.

I also drop randomly a lot, so I just go into campaign, select all the links in “New” , “Cheap” , or “Random” for about 12 rows. The only issue I have with that is I have to manually uncheck the details link, but I’ve been thinking about making an autoit script for that. The amount of tabs you can have will probably depend on how much RAM you have in your computer.

Note that I still browse blogs and drop comments after I’ve dropped my cards. I highly doubt anyone who drops 300 cards is doing everything manually, that would take an eternity I wouldn’t have anytime to blog or work on my site.

Let me know if I missed anything, this should be very similar to other guides out there, but I use linky instead of some other things people do. I have to thank nukeit.org for linky, I believe he mentioned it in one of his blog entries.