What would you do for a business card?

April 15th, 2008 · No Comments

Ok if you sung that title in your head to the tune of the Klondike bar commercials you win the internet. Ok, maybe not the entire internet, but at least the title wasn’t lost on you.

One of my good friends recently introduced me to an interesting website called Entrecard. This site allows you to fill out some basic information and create your own personalized “business card” that you can then use on other sites that have the Entrecard gadget (see mine to the left).

How does this gadget work?

Why what a great seeded question, gotta love the audience for this post! The gadget basically allows other Entrecard users to “drop” their business card on your site and also for you to show ads that have been purchased by others to show on your site. What is really neat about Entrecard is that you get to approve all of the ads that go on your site, and as more ads are queued up, it costs potential advertisers more Entrecard Credits to purchase those ads.

What are these Entrecard Credits (ECs)?

Man, another seeded question, this is fantastic! The ECs you earn from dropping your card on other people’s gadgets (1 credit per drop, max of 300 per day), and from others dropping their card on your gadget. You also earn ECs from when an ad is shown on your site for the period of 1 day. For example, the ads to the left are each earning me 16 ECs per day and I have several queued up. I had to approve each ad individually to make sure that I wanted that person’s image (and link) showing up on my site.

What can ECs be used for?

Will the fun never end? With this much seeding I should start a farm! ECs can be used to purchase advertising on other blogs that you like if you are willing to pay whatever their current rate is. Higher demand blogs have higher advertising rates (because they have a longer advertising queue!). What I really like though is that I can also use ECs to purchase other services such as having someone design me a new graphic for my Entrecard, or a banner ad to represent my site. You can even spend larger numbers of ECs to buy year-long ads on some websites, buy web hosting or even have people review your site and provide suggestions for you!

The system is pretty neat because it really encourages a lot of people to check out your blog and can help new readers find your content. Granted, a lot of the visits (read: most) might just be people dropping their card on your gadget, but when you advertise on someone else’s blog with ECs (that you got for free!) you can get some good traffic back to you eventually and also they will probably check out your blog to make sure that you are a blog that they would want advertising on their own! You will notice the “fluff” traffic as a spike in your bounce back rate if you are using something such as Google Analytics. A higher bounce back rate just indicates that most of your visitors are leaving from the landing page moments after they arrived.

That’s really neat!

Why thank you, imaginary questioner. See, Entrecard has assisted you already by revealing how crazy I am! I am talking to myself on my own blog…