The Entrecard widget was designed to make it easy for others to advertise on your site and for other bloggers to earn credits/attract the blog owner to visit their site in return. However, like all bloggers, you need to increase traffic, and Entrecard's traffic can be optimized further if you follow some basic steps.

1. Place the widget in an area that everyone can see it. Typically, this will be above the fold (or within 1300 pixels of the top of the page.
2. Don't include too many images near the widget, or it will be harder to find when someone scrolls down your page.
3. Explain to your readers what Entrecard is and how they could benefit, including a link near your widget.
4. Don't necessarily use the word "ad" near the widget. People don't usually click on anything with this word, so use something more friendly like "friends" or "follow blogger." Hopefully you get the idea.
5. Ensure your theme doesn't break the widget. I've noticed a few blogs that have un-responsive widgets, which are preventing the rest of the site from loading. Obviously, you are doing a disservice to your blog advertisers and those who visit your blog looking to drop.

Within the new ad system (using 15% of their ad network), you can purchase advertising across all the member sites within Entrecard. I wasn't aware of this (the link is rather hidden on the homepage) mainly due to the fact that it wasn't promoted heavily. I figure they want more of the "outside" to advertise on the site, rather than purely the members.

I don't know how successful this has been - three of the ads that appear in my Sponsor Ads area are still from Entrecard. So, if this is true, they haven't enticed any long-term deals yet.

Pricing is $0.60 CPM for the entire network or $1.20 CPM for targeted categories (choose from one of over fifty categories). They will only accept 125x125 pixel advertisements, and a $25 minimum deposit is required.

The main benefits, as stated from this page are: maximum exposure and click-throughs, professional results, highly effective with detailed stats, and discounted rates.

What do you think of this pricing model (quite similar to the last time advertising was introduced) and how it is being marketed?

You can now purchase Entrecard credits for half the price, they can be found on this page. However, it is slightly harder to compare the value, as the interval has also changed, as follows:

• 4,000 Credits - $12.00
• 6,000 Credits - $23.20
• 16,000 Credits - $44.80
• 32,000 Credits - $84.40
• 64,000 Credits - $166.40

In an effort to retain some of its users, Entrecard has changed the advertisement credit tax to 50%. So, if it costs 512 credits to advertise on your blog, you'll now receive 256 credits in return, rather than 128. The change will remain in effect for three months, unless some dramatic problem arises within the network to suggest that too many credits are maintained.

Taking a look at Entrecard's traffic, you'll find that it was up slightly for the month, but is down nearly half since its peak in the January to March period during this year, when unique visitors were over 1.7 million and total visitors were over 4.4 million. During September, traffic figures rose about 2.3%, to 1.2 million visitors, but total visitors were down nearly 5%.


I expect next month's traffic to be quite a bit lower unless something is done to combat the people who are quickly leaving the service and not staying on the site.

Something interesting to note, however, is the number of visitors not going to the Entrecard site. According to the sub-domains feature of Entrecard, about 6,700 visitors went to the www.entrecard.com website during the month of September, while the rest of the traffic (1.1 million unique visitors) came from serving advertisements (at adn.entrecard.com).

If these figures are anywhere near correct, this may be one of the reasons why Entrecard stopped offering advertisements on their blog and main page - the amount of traffic on their blog/website is extremely low. The only reason the site is even considered in the top 1,500 sites is because of the number of advertisements it serves.

Let's assume there are 26,000 legitimate sites within the network (an average of 500 sites per category). I'm sure that there are less than this, as there are only about thirty "expensive" sites, which are the primary users of the service at this time. There are quite a bit of sites within the 384-1024 credit/day range, with traffic of these blogs in the 3-10K range/monthly.

The most popular/highest costing site on Entrecard at this point receives about 14K visitors per month/45K total visits. It also means that the average Entrecard user (assuming all traffic is from Entrecard) visited the site three times during the month).

Apart from these higher-trafficked sites, the average site on Entrecard receives about 42 visitors per month. Again, this is assuming my estimates are correct, and they may not be - I am open up to discussion and dispute on this if more accurate figures can be proven.

There simply isn't any reason why traffic will increase during the next month across the network, and the main reason traffic will drop in the future will be when the more higher-trafficked sites begin leaving the service. Compete's traffic may be really wrong, as Quantcast estimates traffic at 61.2K, coming off of a maximum of 95.2K since the beginning of Entrecard. However, approximately 90% of the traffic is from "adn.entrecard.com," similar to Compete. I'd assume these figures are low, as "100%" of traffic is from the U.S., which it definitely isn't.

Please lave your thoughts on some of these figures, especially if you can add more specific information about the traffic and return that can be expected from the site.

It appears as though Entrecard is doing even more to alienate the members of the service that are left. The forums have completely closed (and have been closed for just a few days now).


Without any warning, the forums were closed, and there will be no new one opened for quite some time, if ever. The main reason was probably due to the moderators and members who would often get into disputes over rather minor issues. It became spam-infested over time, and really didn't provide much value to the site.

However, now that there are no forums at all, there is no way for members to communicate with one another and promote their blogs in this method. Forums serve as a method of off-topic conversation.

Their Twitter profile remains dull and not updated. No new updates have been posted since September, and I honestly doubt how much interaction the members of Entrecard receive simply browsing and visiting one another's sites.

Finally, all new posts on the Entrecard Blog will have their comments closed, ensuring that no negative opinions are posted on the site. All one would have to do is enter a simple Google Search for specific terms to learn about the negatives of Entrecard. I'm not saying everything is negative about Entrecard, but for the most part, they aren't working on the positive elements of the site that helped it grow so rapidly.

Now, for a network built around developing relationships, there is only one way to communicate with the site - through email. This is an extremely faceless conversation - they will never know any other details about you other than your name and perhaps your website. It's a mindset and business model that rejects what helped to create the success. Everything will disappear within a few months, and it wasn't the members' fault.