The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

I was doing my daily drop of cards and came upon a blog called The Entrecarder that I had seen before while dropping but I stopped for a minute to read his most recent post about some of the upcoming problems Entrecarde is going to run into if things continue on the current path.

The post that I read is titled “Entrecard: Is the Honeymoon Over?” and I think anyone who is using Entrecard should drop by and give it a read and comment on it. One of the good points he makes is that with the recent Alexa Rank changes, high bounce-rate traffic (such as what Entrecard generates) is being given a lower weighting in the ranking algorithm. Many people used Entrecard to buff their Alexa Rank but that will no longer help them as they need actual returning traffic not just people who come in for 1-3 seconds to drop a card on your page. If you analyze your traffic with something such as Google Analytics, you can see the spike in traffic generated by Entrecard but can also watch as your bounce rate goes through the roof since most visitors are sticking around for mere seconds as they drop.

However, occasionally someone will stop by to make a comment such as I did on The Entrecarder’s post. Perhaps i’m one of the few who actually is interested by the blogs and topics I come across and take the time to comment on them. Not every post or blog catches my eye, but I have made 3-4 comments in the last day on Entrecard blogs I was dropping on.

I think the key is to try to capture the interest of people as they pass by to drop their card. Think of your blog / recent post as the opportunity for a 3 second ad. Heck, this could become a whole new medium of advertising in the 21st century since people have such low attention spans these days. If you can capture interest in that low a time period you are truly a guru of marketing and should be commended. I know that this type of short attention span content works as Twitter is extremely popular and updates there are measured in characters, not words (140 characters max to be exact!).

Something Fun!

For all those who are getting burned out on dropping already, I did come up with a fun way of dropping cards but I think it might mess up some of the ad click-through statistics. On your own site or another one you are dropping on, click on their ad then drop on that site then click on that site’s ad and so on. See how long it takes before you loop back into one of the sites you’ve already dropped on. It usually only took me 4-5 clicks before I was back at one of the blogs I had started at or clicked on along the way! Kind of neat to think of how circular the Entrecard network is with us advertising on each other’s blogs.

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