Unsolicited Advice To Entrecard

Although many of us know already about it, I still have to mention  Entrecard (EC) as a community that helps bloggers promote their crafts and gain traffic to their sites for FREE. Based on my more than six (6) months of being a member of EntreCard (I was only active for 4 months now because I had to pause blogging in late September till mid-November last year due to disastrous flood that hit my area), I can safely say it truly is an effective way of having more unique visitors, increased blog comments and a good network of fellow bloggers at no cost to us. However, in all the time that I am with Entrecard, I cannot help but wonder how the present site owners make money and recover their investment. They had just purchased the site from its original owner when I joined the community and we know they need to make money in its operation and continued existence. They had revised some policies of the original owner with respect to awarding EC Credits to active members in order to control “inflation” but I personally opine that the moves they had made so far are not sufficient to bring the cash in.

Why am I making this unsolicited advice to Entrecard management? Is it not enough that I just enjoy and be grateful to the owners’ goodwill for all the benefits I mentioned above? As a conscientious member of the EC community, I am taking this liberty to share my analysis of EntreCard’s image as a paid advertising medium for bloggers and how to alleviate the situation so that more “advertisers only” will use EntreCard.

While most active EC members enjoy increased traffic to their sites, the visits they are getting are not from the advertisements they place on the Entrecard network. The increased traffic that an active member gets are mainly from reciprocal visits (called “drops”) that EC members make daily to each other. A look at my EC account dashboard clearly supports this fact. For the past thirty (30) days, my blog received 1,802 drops but only 25 clicks via the ads I placed in the network. Also, only 87 clicks were made by my visitors on the ads in my EC widget in the past 30 days.

The above mentioned statistics is the reason why most active members like me are not so keen in placing ads in the network and spend their accumulated EC credits resulting to inflation (members having too much EC credits in their accounts). So, I am saying, the situations that Entrecard have now are high inflation ( though it could be lower now than before because the EC management decided not to give credits to a member when someone dropped by his site) and low click-through rate to advertisers.

What then do I advise the EC management to do to solve the above-mentioned problems? Actually, my suggested solutions to the problem are very simple. To increase the click-through rate, do not give EC credits to members unless they click the ads in the network. Yes, a member must still click the “Drop” button then the ad in the widget to get one (1) EC credit. On the issue of high inflation, put a lower limit on how many sites can an EC member visit to get the credits. At present, I understand the limit to be three hundred (300) sites per account. I suggest to lower it to one hundred (100) sites per account only.

Regarding increased monetization of Entrecard, I have some workable suggestions but I would prefer to come out with them if the EC management would have positive response to the suggestions I enumerated above. I would also prefer to have them communicated privately with the proper people in the Entrecard organization.