www.affiliateconfession.com

Watch out, here comes the hurricane Katrina of Entrecard advertising. I’ve managed to accumulate 8,000 Entrecard credits by dropping like a madman for the last few days and from mainly buying Entrecard credits on eBay. Yes, there are now a handful of individuals auctioning off their excess of credits.

Earning Entrecard credits is monotonous work and the most credits I’ve been able to accumulate at any one time has been around 2,500 because I won 750, earned 200 for writing a recommendation and I think I had a large amount refunded after someone removed the Entrecard widget from their blog. The rest were either from cards dropped on my blog, credits earned for people advertising and of course my own drops. But now with more than 8,000 credits, I’m going to be buying up Entrecard real estate faster than Donald Trump builds condos and fires people.

The whole point of the experiment is to get as much traffic as I can through their advertising system and see if my time is being well spent using Entrecard. Some time back when I had 2,500 credits I bought 30 or 40 ads and was fairly disappointed with the results, even though I was very selective in purchasing ads. I’m going to be even more selective now, using what I learned from the last experiment or rather, advertising push.

Entrecard has brought me quite a bit of traffic and without doing a full analysis of that traffic, I do believe some of it has converted into rss readers and at the very least, has branded Affiliate Confession somewhat in the blogosphere. However, there are some rather huge drawbacks to the whole Entrecard system. Number one is, it consumes way too much time. Unless you buy credits like I have done, earning them by dropping cards is not an efficient use of my time. The problem stems from seriously overpriced ad rates on some blogs. There are now 3 blogs that cost 500 or more credits to advertise on for a single day, and one of those blogs has a grayed out page rank. (It seems like the whole Entrecard advertising economy would be much better for advertisers if the individual ads stayed on a blog for 48 hours, instead of the current 24 hours.)

Even though I would never advertise on any of those blogs, other blogs in my niche are getting overpriced as well and getting beyond my affordability with the amount of Entrecard dropping I do, or in reality, have time for.

Lets get back to the mad advertising campaign. My goal is to advertise on a total of 100 to 150 blogs and spend every last credit by the end of this week. You normally don’t see any wait times for advertising on someones blog longer than 10 days so the ads should all be finished running 10 days or so from the end of this week. The criteria for picking advertisers will be as follows, their Entrecard widget must be within 2 sidebar clicks of the fold of the page, the blog must have a page rank, they must have backlinks as viewable in Google and they must have at least 100 rss readers. If their rss readers aren’t viewable, then I’ll give higher priority to their backlinks.

The campaign will be a success if I get a 50% increase in traffic and get 75 new rss readers. As of today I have 151 rss readers and average 165 unique visitors per day. I will evaluate the traffic at the end of the experiment, but the goal is to have 226 rss readers and have roughly 250 uniques per day by the cut off date of let’s say, March 10th. If that doesn’t happen, I probably won’t be spending much time dropping cards and participating in the Entrecard economy. I won’t remove the widget, but I won’t be wasting time with it any longer. The goal is not to stop using Entrecard, it is to hopefully see the possibility of it, so look for the Affiliate Confession 125 x 125 banner everywhere.

Alan