www.affiliateconfession.com

A few days ago I posted that Entrecard is now selling credits for $9.50 per 1,000 and suggested a less expensive way of acquiring Entrecard credits through eBay for less than half the price. That post got a couple of interesting comments I though would be worth discussing to see where everyone is with Entrecard advertising and branding.

John from JT Pratt’s Blogging Mistakes commented that rather than spend money on buying Entrecard credits, he would spend that money via Adwords, driving traffic to a niche site and hopefully see a better return on his advertising dollars. This raises a good question on whether Entrecard is a viable advertising medium at all, or if it is just good for getting a little traffic and occasionally meeting other bloggers through dropping your card on their blog.

I have to keep repeating that any way you look at it, advertising on Entrecard is a lot of work. I’ve purchased 25,000 credits or so in the last few weeks, spent about that many and have spent a considerable amount of time looking at blogs to advertise on. And the main problem I see with this method is that, even though I’ve generated some 200 to 250 extra visitors every day, in 8 to 10 days you have to start the process all over again because every bit of your advertising is used up. I think this is the achilles heel of Entrecard. Too much time spent for too little results.

But what about the branding aspect of Entrecard? Over the last 2 weeks or so, more than 300 blogs have displayed and who knows how many thousands of people have seen the AffiliateConfession.com 125 x 125 banner and domain name. So if anything else, the name of this blog is getting in front of more eyeballs on a daily basis.

The sole purpose of buying Entrecard credits for me is to brand Affiliate Confession. That’s where I’m at with this present effort. I’m not really trying to earn money by sending traffic to this blog through Entrecard, my purpose is to get as many people as possible to see the AffiliateConfession.com url and name and get that burned into people’s brains. The money from this blog will come later.

While branding through Entrecard is only one of the channels I’m working through, I don’t honestly know if it is worth it. Marketing your brand is hard to track since there aren’t really any dollars being generated directly from the efforts. I am seeing increased rss subscribers, comments and questions sent through my contact form, but it remains to be seen if this increased activity is due to the time, effort and money spent at Entrecard.

As John suggested, the cost is also an issue. With $100 you can buy roughly 10,000 credits through Entrecard itself or you can buy roughly 25,000 credits through eBay as long as someone is selling them. This is why I suggest going through eBay and saving more than 50%. Alternatively, if you price your keywords right, you may be able to send 500 targeted clicks to a niche site, or even your blog, through Adwords for that $100.

What do you think? If you were in the process of branding yourself, would you rather spend $100 for 10,000 to 25,000 Entrecard credits or spend that money on more targeted clicks from Adwords on something else?

I’ve been doing a lot of advertising through Entrecard lately and have had some pretty good results. As you can see in the image above at the height of my advertising spree after accumulating 30,000 credits, I had 48 ads running at one time. I have also increased my traffic by 200 to 250 visitors a day via ads.

I still think it takes way too much time to find good places to advertise coupled with the fact that your ads only run for 24 hours. It is quite time consuming to maintain a level of running more than 30 ads a day. However, Entrecard has made it easier to visit the blog you are interested in advertising on by being able to go directly to that blog from the category rather than the individual users profile. This saves you a click for each blog you are interested in placing ads with.

Entrecard has also made it easier to get credits because you can now buy them on the site and they are priced at $9.50 per 1,000 credits and sold in bundles of 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 credits each. So, 10,000 credits will end up costing you $95. It would take you over a month to earn that many credits by dropping the limit of 300 per day. So, in some ways, that is a fairly decent way to spend a little of your advertising dollars.

But it gets even better when you find out you can get Entrecard credits on eBay for less than half of what Entrecard sell them for. I purchased 5,000 for $22 and 10,000 credits for only $40 recently and as I write this post there’s a Buy It Now offer for 10,000 credits for only $30 and there are usually 10 to 12 auctions or sales of Entrecard credits going on at any one time.

Pretty simple math, if you want to do massive advertising with Entrecard and save a bunch of money on the deal, buy Entrecard credits on eBay.

Microsoft AdCenter has been running a great promotion for some time now, I think since January, where you can get $75 in free clicks if you are a new user. (You may just be able to open a new account with a different credit card. I haven’t checked that out though.) However, the promotion is ending as of June 30th, so you only have 2 more weeks to take advantage of free advertising.

Through personal experience and what I’ve read on some blogs, the MS AdCenter interface tends to be a little difficult to use. It is a lot less user friendly than the Google Adwords interface, but while some see that as a disadvantage, you could look at it in a different light. Less people will be using it, giving you a better opportunity to take advantage of their search network. Other people, such as Jeremy Palmer, refer to both Microsoft Adcenter and Yahoo Search Marketing as the hidden gems of PPC advertising because less advertisers use them and in some cases the traffic tends to convert better, especially from MS Adcenter.

Regardless of how easy they are to use or how well they convert, it’s always nice to get free advertising from a PPC search network. 

If you want to take advantage of this offer, you can visit Microsoft Adcenter to get $75 in free clicks until June 30th.

I learned a lesson in the last several days that I assume could have been much worse. Sometimes no matter what you hear or read about, you just have to try something for yourself. It’s probably a good idea to follow the advice you read about in some cases rather than being the Lone Ranger and doing it your way.

Case in point, I recently bought a text link on a very high profile blog, which will remain nameless, and thought I would get some traffic and maybe a little PR juice as well. Needless to say, I ignored the most recent advice I heard from Jeremy Palmer, I believe it was through the Black Ink Project, in an online session. Jeremy remarked that he thought he would boost some of his sites by buying text links and ended up getting them all penalized and losing some serious rankings.

Of course I thought, that’s Jeremy, Google knows about him because he’s a big shot, I’m just a medium order of fries, they don’t know about me. Wrong!

I don’t get a lot of traffic from Google here at Affiliate Confession, but it is enough that I don’t want to lose it, mainly because it is a source of ever changing new traffic. The 30 or 40 organic searchers that Google sends my way every day come from a huge variety of long tail keywords that are pretty diverse in the niches they come from. I jeopardized that traffic last week when I purchased the text link on May 28th and only 3 days later my traffic from Google dropped by 80% as you can see below:

Luckily I realized what was going on the second day after purchase and immediately converted that text link to an affiliate offer. It took a couple of days for the link to change, but when it did, the traffic returned to normal. I’m thinking I didn’t do any long term damage to this blog because I caught what was happening in time and changed it in just a couple of days. My strategy for buying text links now is to either use them only for affiliate offers or to experiment with links on lower profile sites sending traffic to sites that I can afford to do without. I’ll probably just stick with affiliate offers though.

Sometimes you just have to do something stupid before you realize how stupid it is. Don’t be stupid.

Lots of things are changing at Entrecard besides their new home page design. One of the changes they recently made that’s really the most significant since Entrecard’s inception is that you can now add multiple blogs to your account up to as many as you want. For those that don’t know, Entrecard is a blog widget advertising system.

You can add other blogs to your Entrecard account in one of two ways. You can either just simply add a new blog to your main Entrecard account or you can link accounts together. Many people have added Entrecard to their multiple blogs by creating individual accounts, so if you now have 3 or 4 accounts, you can merge them all together which will make keeping track of multiple email addresses and passwords a thing of the past. This is a very good move on Entrecard’s part.

And to encourage you to add additional blogs to your account, Entrecard is having a drawing for 15,000 credits in each of 5 different levels of adding multiple blogs to your account. If you add anywhere from 2 to 25 blogs you will get a chance to win one of 5 drawings for those 15,000 credits. That many credits can get you a bunch of advertising and will bring a decent amount of traffic to your blog.

Entrecard has also come out with an ebook as well and I know you’re probably thinking, what do we need an Entrecard ebook for, all we need to do is click, drop and buy advertising, how difficult is that? I thought the same thing, but found out the ebook does have a lot of good info in it. One thing I learned was that clicking on the Entrecard logo on the Entrecard widget on someones blog will take you to their profile. I’ve been wondering how I could quickly advertise on someone’s blog I like, without having to search Entrecard to find them. Here’s your answer.

I still wish Entrecard ads would run for 48 hours instead of 24 because I think it would be much more economical for the time spent on finding good advertising, but I am pretty impressed with the amount of features they keep adding to the service. Unlike many other blog widget deals, the constant development and tweaking of Entrecard is a big plus.

If you aren’t a member of Entrecard, you can join here and you can get the details of all their new features and the contest on their blog here.