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My good friend Damien Riley asked me what my method was for purchasing advertisements on Entrecard and I thought this would be a good topic for a blog post. I have done a similar post previously in my Entrecard for beginners post, but wanted to give just an overview of my logic when purchasing advertisements.
Here is one of my purchasing mentalities, don’t purchase too many spots on blogs that have the same cost. This will make your advertisements all run on the same day, and many people go from blog to blog dropping, if they see your ad and drop on it, but see it again on 10 other sites on the same night, they can’t drop more than once so they won’t bother even clicking on it again. I try not to have my blog advertised more than 4 or 5 times on a single day for this reason. I see many blogs that have 20 or so ads on a single day and wonder how many clicks they actually get from doing that kind of advertising?
Update - How you get so many blogs ads on the same day, I forgot to include this information, everytime you purchase an advertisement you are purchasing the queue. So an AD that costs 2 EC you will have ad same day, 4 EC is next day, 8 EC is 2 days later, 16 EC is 3 days later, 32 EC is 4 days later…etc. You always know the cost of the ad = # of days before your ad displays. So never purchase more than 4 ad’s for the same cost at any given time. No more than 4 purchases of 8 EC ads in a given week, unless you want more than 4 ads running on the same day.
- Step 1 – Use Your Entrecard Statistics
The first thing you want to do when you purchase advertisements on Entrecard is look at your statistics and see what previous advertisements have worked best for you. Log into your Entrecard account and click on your “Statistics” tab.
Here you will see your Top Droppers, Your Highest Clicks and your Credits Per Click, I will discuss each of these sections here:
- Top Droppers – As often as possible I purchase an advertisement on all of my top droppers as a thank you for being consistant in dropping on my site, however many top droppers are also very popular EC blogs that already cost over 1024 credits to advertise, so I usually can only hit some of them. In this case I rotate them out, try not to purchase too many ads on sites that cost the same, or your ad runs on many sites on the same day which doesn’t always indicate a higher number of hits.
- # of Clicks – This is how many clicks you have had from your advertisement on that blog, always purchase your top clicks if they are over 10 in my opinion, this means you had 10 clicks from a single site and this is a valuable site to advertise on. As you can see from my above image, one site netted me 59 clicks in a single advertisement run, this means that one site accounted for about 20% of traffic to my blog that day.
- Credits Per Click – This shows you which advertisements were the most cost effective. The lower the number the better, if you have any that are 1 EC per click or less, then these you should purchase since you got your money’s worth or better. Anything over 20 credits per click isn’t worth it, I would stay to around 10 credits per click, anything else just costs too much. The exception is if you had a very expensive blog that cost 1024 EC, if it cost you 20 credits per click, it means you received over 50 clicks from that ad (this may be worth it), but for a blog that cost 128 EC and you pay 20 credits per click, it means you only received 6 clicks for your 20 credits.
Once I have purchased through my statistics, then I start campaigning for advertisements. Click on the Campaign Tab, what I first do is find blogs in the same category as my blog.
- Step 2 – Campaign Advertising
Click on Search and then select your category.
I always do a “Random” order, this way you get a fair mix of EC credit cost blogs, and select 4 or 5 from each EC payment range. (4 EC, 8 EC, 16 EC, 32 EC, 64 EC, 128 EC, 256 EC) until you reach how much you are willing to spend. If I have lots of EC, I will then choose another category that is similar interest and repeat over and over until I have purchased the advertisements that I want.
I seldom get my EC credits worth from advertising on the top 10 sites for each category, I have paid the 4096 EC cost for some blogs and netted only 20-30 clicks in return which is horrible considering I can purchase 6 ads on 16 or 32 EC blogs for 1/10th that and get 5x the number of clicks. It is far better to purchase more ads on smaller sites than it is to purchase one ad on a giant site from my past experience.
This is how I leverage Entrecard for my advertisements.
- Step 3 – Browse Entrecard Forums
You can find great advertising deals in the Entrecard forums, where you can purchase week or month long ad spots for the cost of some daily slots on some blogs. I often will purchase a month advertisement for 500 or 1000 EC and then use Google Analytics to determine the number of hits you received to see if it was worth renewing your advertisement. Some have turned into good hits for me averaging 10 EC per click, others turned out to be 500 EC for 5 clicks the entire month. But at least your ad is up and on a site for a month and gives your site exposure.
- Step 4 – Direct Offers
If you see blogs that you really like and they are on the entrecard network, contact the blog owner through Entrecard and ask them how much it would cost to place a 1 week or 1 month advertisement in EC credits. You will find many blogger will give you a substantial discount compared to buying EC through the normal EC purchase method.
- Summary:
Entrecard is a wonderful network to advertise your blog on and you will develop your own system, above I only share my methods of advertising. I get an average of 350 – 400 visits to my site per day and about 33% are from Entrecard traffic, so my methods alone bring me about 100 visits per day, so it works for me. Don’t spend every day looking to purchase advetisements, set 1 day per week where you will spend one hour or so doing your ads for the entire week. You can spend way too much time if you try and to advertising on a daily basis. I devote only 1 hour per week to purchasing EC ads and queuing up a weeks worth of advertising from a single one hour session.
Remember blog smarter not harder
-Dragon Blogger
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Tags: advertising your blog, blog advertising, blog networks, blog promotion, blogging help, blogging tips, Buying ads on entrecard, entrecard, entrecard advertising, entrecard forums, entrecard help, entrecard statistics, entrecard tips, purchasing blog ads, social networking
March 19th, 2009 at 9:40 am
That’s some great advice, it can be a very daunting task sometimes, trying to get value for your EC credits and like most users of EC like myself, I always seem to get most of my traffic from EntreCard, so every little bit of advice is most welcome..
Blazing Mindss last blog post..My First Post on the FMB Blog – Twitter vs Blogging
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March 19th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Absolutely fantastic. One thing though: In your introduction you talk about advertising too many in the same day but you never describe how that happens or how to avoid it. I’d like that explained but for now, I’ll just focus on the other amazing tips you give. I’m sending this out to a few social media for you. Many people will benefit by this post. Thanks.
Damien Rileys last blog post..Done With Paper
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March 19th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Reading your post, I gained more knowledge on how to maximize the use of Entrecard System.
I like the part on how to leverage the EC for advertisements.
Thanks for sharing.
Vlads last blog post..Earth Hour – Switch Off our Lights
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March 21st, 2009 at 7:46 am
Purchasing several ads of the same price has little bearing on them running at the same time. You are assuming that everyone will accept the ad at the same time and they don’t. There can often be 2 or 3 days delay. In fact, often more but I usually cancel if the delay is too long.
Then you need to add in the changeover time variation. Not all ads run at the same time of day. One could start running at 00:02 on, say, 22 March, another at 23:58 on the same day. Not a lot of overlap there, and you cannot predict what it will be.
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March 21st, 2009 at 11:23 am
If you take the assumption that the average person approves the queue within 24 hours or so, then you can assume that 8 EC will always display around 2 days out, you must give a +-24 hour window, but again, if you purchase 10 ads at the same EC, then at any one time there is a 50% chance that some of them are overlapping.
I am not saying don’t purchase any ads for the same EC, I am only saying don’t purchase more than 3-4 in the same category at the same time. If you purchase them from different categories you tend to get wider range of visitors.
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March 22nd, 2009 at 10:21 pm
Thank you for that aricle. It will be very useful to me.
Donna M. Clarks last blog post..Weigh In-March 17, 2009
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January 26th, 2010 at 1:51 pm
I am wondering who sets the credits? To advertise on my blog it says 32. When i see some at 2?
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January 26th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
It is based on how many ads are in your queue, if no ads are in your queue it costs 2 credits to advertise and doubles for each ad in your queue, 1 ad in your queue then price is four, 2 ads and price costs 8, 3 ads and price cost 16, 4 ads and price costs 32….etc until the max of 4096 credits to advertise.
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