So I purchased a $10 Entrecard Advertising campaign last week to let people know I was testing it and it took about three days for my $10 to be consumed by the advertising. Below are the results that my $10 bought me to dragonblogger.com over the past few days.

Here is the actual breakdown of EC of my advertising account:
I received 526 clicks, 78590 impressions and my blog was approved 79.2% of the time to run on other bloggers sites. My effective CM and CPC were .12 cents and .019 cents respectively. Which basically means I paid just under 2 cents per click to my blog, which is very similar to Google Adwords rates for new advertising and bloggers.

How did the breakdown look on my blog you ask?

The week prior to my Entrecard run from March 27th – April 2nd, I had 3,159 unique visits to the site, with 9,348 page views:

Now check out the week of my Entrecard advertising:

The week of my Entrecard Advertising I had 3,371 unique visits and 10,090 PageViews. Entrecard went from bringing in 16% of my traffic the previous week, to 19% of my average traffic the week of my advertising. Now its too early to tell, but I have seen some average increase to my blog stay around. I should also note I did much fewer blog drops this week barely averaging 100 per day from my normal 300 per day the week prior, so I would have expected my EC visitations to decrease from my lack of dropping.

My blog had a steady average of 400 visits per day, which has spiked to 600 per day average for the past four days, which is a huge increase, my blog is up 21% over the last 30 days, which is tremendous for me. But, after analyzing the statistics, I was running a Stumble upon marathon last week, and I saw much of my increase in traffic was due to stumbled posts causing 80-100 visit spikes over my normal sites.

• My Summary:

I think it brought in some traffic, and probably some of that traffic will now routinely do my daily drops as I am seeing new cards in my drops inbox, but my ten dollars didn’t go very far, and with Entrecard now doubling the cost of advertising, your ten dollars would go an average of less far than it does now.

I think if you are a baby blog starting out, or you have reached a traffic plataeu however, a ten or 20 dollar push to advertise on entrecard once every few months could help revitalize your blog and bring in a few hundred extra visits and some of those can translate into long term readers.

I am curious to know what other peoples results and successes were with Entrecard advertising.

-Dragon Blogger

One of my favorite ways to find new bloggers and to perform my EC drops is to visit someones blog and click on the EC badge to visit the next blogger, I used to do this repeatedly and visit forty to fifty blogs a day through this badge hopping method. I would follow, read a post, drop, comment, and I would find some cool blogs that I hadn’t found before. You can find new blogs instead of always dropping on the same ones in your inbox over and over, and I have used this to find and make new blog friends as a result.

Now that Entrecard has opened its network to advertisers which don’t have to be bloggers, too often now the Badge hopping tactic is wasted as I end up on an advertiser site with no badge, or the same advertiser is on ten blogs sites in a row, so I can’t drop on them multiple times. This means I am now resorting to doing EC drops from my inbox, with only the occasional EC Badge Hop when I see an EC Profile I don’t recognize, I am so familiar with around 300 to 350 badges, that I know the blog by badge picture, and I like to change it up by visiting new blogs every so often.

I think Entrecard should evolve to allow multiple ad slots and put advertisers in one of the two or four, this way that you can still do badge dropping and your paid people will still have 100% ad time viewed. This satisfies advertisers getting 100% visibility in one badge slot, and your EC bloggers getting 100% at the same time.

I noticed that many people within the first week of Entrecard offering advertising, as I have already approved over 40 ads for my blog, this means an influx of thousands of dollars for the EC network, and I read on the forums that EC Cash Out should be a feature available within a week or two. It will be interesting to see what kind of exchange rate you get on EC Credits for cash.

-Dragon Blogger

Now that Entrecard offers paid advertising for companies and bloggers looking to get their ads on over 10,000 blogs I have decided to purchase a small slice of this advertiser space to see what kind of impact it will have for my blog. I have decided to fund $10 into advertising and select the .02 cents per click cost, which actually buys me 500 clicks to my site. I am curious to see how many actual clicks make it to my site as a result of this advertising test, and see how many days it takes to accumulate 500 clicks through the Entrecard network.

Normally, I get about 100 clicks per day through the normal Entrecard channel, but most of this is due to doing many reciprocal drops, it would be far better and more time efficient to purchase advertising space and get the click backs rather than perform the drops but we shall see. Entrecredits will continue to become more valuable in the blogosphere as you will soon be able to cash in your entrecredits and earn money. I don’t know what the rate will be yet, but there is potential that some of the most active Entrecredit bloggers could make $25 dollars or more per month just cashing in excess Entrecredits.

This would make Entrecard vastly superior to sites such as Adgitize where I have only made about $5 in four months of hosting ads on their network, Entrecard seems to have a better system in place and is looking to be a better network and system than Adgitize which is still small by comparison and doesn’t have the marketplace or value of “points” like Entrecredits have with no ability to trade them, cash them in or do anything other than collect change for them.

I will report to everyone if I think the $10 advertising on Entrecard was worth the money after all of the money is spent, wish me luck, I have noticed about ten other bloggers who immediately purchased AD space as soon as it was available and will be curious to see how well they fare as well.

-Dragon Blogger

Seriously, I decided to spend some time the other day and browse the Entrecard Marketplace just to see how established it is becoming. I have a five year old son and he loves super heroes, so when I saw that someone was offering 20 random DC SuperHero comic books for 1,500 Entrecredits, I decided to jump on this deal. Imagine having 20 comic books for my son and I to read together for merely 1500 virtual credits and shipping was included in the transaction.

This tells me Entrecard Marketplace will be huge as many people are offering writing services, comment services, advertisement slots all for Entrecredits. Let me tell you you can purchase some really good things for Entrecredits if you are a blogger, you can buy links, traffic, SEO Juice (PR flow), and even some decent physical items (but this list is still very small).

I see good things for the Entrecard Marketplace in the future.

Some tips for the entrecard team, they should automatically stop displaying items that have no quantity remaining, or they should tell the purchaser right up front that there are no more items remaining. Too many times I clicked a purchase only to have it rejected with an error which wasted my time a little bit.

-Dragon Blogger