Drop your Entrecard

Entrecard is a new website that was launched at Blog World in November by 22-year old soon to be Internet Millionaire Graham Langdon. We say soon to be because although Entrecard doesn’t yet have any monetisation it’s a sure fire winner based on the exposure and high level blogs that are using it.

Entrecard is basically a business card swapping website for Blogs. You sign up to Entrecard for free, create your site profile, or card, and then ‘drop’ it on other people’s websites. By placing the Entrecard code onto your website you’re allowing the display of other people’s adverts, and for them to drop their cards on you.

You earn credits by having cards dropped on your site, by you dropping cards on other sites and by people ‘purchasing’ ads on your site… although no money changes hands. It’s all free. You’re simply using the power of your blog to buy adverts on other blogs.

In this manner you can have your website advertised on some of the biggest and best blogs out there, such as Johnchow.com, but only for 24 hours. Each advertising slot is for 1 day only.

It all sounds very simple, yet there are a few pros and cons:

Cons

• The majority of the traffic you receive from Entrecard is only visiting your blog to drop their card and earn credits
• The queuing system makes it very hard to advertise on the bigger websites, even if you have the credits to do so
• The ads placed are only for 24 hours and the links go through a redirect so are no use for SEO

Pros

• You’re exposing your blog to other likeminded webmasters who would otherwise perhaps not have found your website
• The traffic you get tends to be intelligent webmasters who understand the SEO game and as such often leave comments
• You can advertise on websites that would otherwise cost a lot of money

So will Entrecard succeed? One of their proposed monetisation strategies involves selling off 5% of all ad impressions which would definitely make them a stack of money, but would that also frighten off the bigger blogs who would be promoting Entrecard for little or no reward? The size of the Entrecard badge is such that someone like John Chow could easily make a few hundred dollars from the same space on his website. Why let Entrecard have that money?

For this to work I think they’ll need to come up with some new features, which I know they are working on right now, and I suspect for it to be truly successful rather than simply selling off 5% of impressions they’ll instead offer a revenue share. This would ensure that blogs will continue to promote the Entrecard service as everyone will benefit.

Darren
Content Editor