www.affiliateconfession.com

I don’t spend that much time doing the Entrecard thing any longer, but I do occasionally drop a card here and there and buy an advertising spot when I have a few spare minutes. I think people are beginning to see that the time spent with Entrecard is not really paying off because it’s a lot of work for a little benefit.

But I will give things one more shot here because I just won 10,000 credits in a contest John Chow was sponsoring over at his blog. That’s a lot of credits and it can buy a ton of advertising, so it will probably be worth the time go through the blogs in my niche at Entrecard, finding good ones and spend them all to see if I can increase my traffic for a couple of weeks. It would take you 33 days to earn that many credits just by dropping 300 cards per day. Of course you will earn more credits than that in 33 days because of drops on you and credits earned through accepting advertising on your blog, it’s just an illustration of how out of kilter things are at Entrecard.

My initial thought is to not spend that much time at all and just go for the lowest priced blogs in a massive sweep of 600 ads or so. I’m probably going to do that and then hit up a few of the higher priced blogs for a little wider exposure.

After I spend all the credits I’ll report back on the results.

Popularity: 9% [?]

I’m souring on Entrecard as of late because it consumes an inordinate amount of time in relation to the actual benefits it provides. But, if you want to take earning credits by mindless card dropping out of the equation and save some time, then head over to John Chow’s blog for a chance to win $10,000 Entrecard credits he is giving away.

John has managed to accumulate more than 18,000 credits and is giving away 10,000 of them. Bloggers like John who get around 5,000 to 6,000 visitors a day have no trouble earning a huge amount of Entrecard credits, because everyone wants to drop their card on John and everyone wants to advertise on his blog. But those of us that don’t get quite the amount of traffic the Dot Com Mogul does have to mindlessly drop cards to earn lots of credits.

Entrecard does have it’s advantages in that if you earn enough credits, you can eventually advertise on high profile blogs like John’s or Problogger of which I just submitted an advertising request at 2,048 credits. This does allow those that don’t have a very big advertising budget to get some great exposure, but you have to work quite hard for only a singe day’s worth of advertising. This has been my biggest beef with Entrecard, the fact that your advertising on any one blog lasts a scant 24 hours. You can see my Massive Entrecard Advertising Experiment Results for more on how much time Entrecard consumes for the benefit it provides.

Okay, I’m off my rant now. So, if you want to avoid a lot of work earning credits and would like a chance to win 10,000 credits for free, check out John’s contest.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Has Entrecard doomed itself to be known as just another promising, traffic generating blog widget to render itself useless? The credit pricing structure has now been completely changed at Entrecard and is no longer based on how many cards are dropped on your blog. It is solely based on how many advertisers have placed ads on your blog.

The way pricing works now is every time someone places an ad with you and you accept it, the price of your advertising spot doubles. Starting with 2 points for the first ad and doubling with every ad placed, quickly increases the cost to rather ridiculous levels. The switchover to advertisers determining the price, vs traffic and card droppers determining the price has caused some serious anomalies in the system. Blogs that used to cost no more than 30 credits to advertise on are now commanding outrageous prices of more than 2,000 credits and Problogger, who must have had many ads waiting to show, now costs more than 130,000 credits to advertise with. Correct, that is one hundred thirty thousand credits!

You can obviously see that there will be a settling of the Entrecard economy in the next couple of weeks because no one will want to advertise on a blog that costs 2,000 credits, when it is only worth 30, and of course no one has 130,000 credits to advertise on Problogger much less other blogs costing over 250,000 credits. A positive I see with the new pricing structure is that you will also potentially earn more credits as the cost to advertise on your blog doubles with every new ad placed.

What I don’t like about Entrecard though, is for the very little return it has brought me, I’ve determined I spend way to much time with this system, dropping cards and finding advertisers. It just not economically feasible for one to use their time clicking Entrecard widgets and researching advertisers to see if they are worth 1024, or 2048, or 4096 credits or more. What I determined from the massive Entrecard advertising expeirement was that it was better to just place blanket advertising on the least expensive blogs that had good widget placement and then look at the best return and continue to advertise on a regular basis with those blogs.

It used to be easy to find good deals in the Entrecard system and to be able to consistently advertise with those that brought you the most traffic for the least amount of credits. Case in point, Joel Comm’s blog was an incredible deal for an Entrecard advertiser. I have advertised 4 times on his blog for never more than 18 credits and received about 1 click for every 2 credits spent. However, I just used 7 times more credits than I’ve ever spent to place another ad today on Joel’s blog.

The main problem this new pricing system has created is that it will require even more time to watch you favorite blogs to see when advertising with them will be economical. I forsee people watching on a daily basis to see if the price continues to drop on a blog, before they decide to place their advertising. Sorry, I’m not going to spend any more time with Entrecard. I’d like to spend a lot less time with what is becoming a huge time waster.

I’ll wait another 2 or 3 weeks to see how this all pans out, but the amount of time spent with Entrecard is ridiculous. I’m thinking of dropping the whole deal. I’ve mentioned this before and I still think a solution is to have the ads show for 48 hours instead of 24. That way you could possibly get twice as much return for the same amount of work.

The new pricing structure seems to be an attempt to stabilize the Entrecard advertising economy, but as long as a blogger’s time economy is out of whack with Entrecard, I think Entrecard is doomed.

Popularity: 8% [?]

I guess being an affiliate marketer and not making the bulk of my income from my blog has its advantages. The main advantage is that I don’t have to try and please Google with Affiliate Confession. Now, in my affiliate ventures I do try to follow the webmaster rules as best I understand them coming from the Mother Ship. But on this blog I have a luxury and I’m going to enjoy it.

One thing the luxury of not having to please Google, because I must make money from this blog, has taught me or rather shown me, is that I’m tiring of having to think about everything I do as if the goons at Google were looking over my shoulder. That’s just wrong. When did Google decide they’re the only game in town and you must abide by their rules of netiquette. Let’s call it what it is, Google is running a dictatorship and if you want to play in their game you must abide by what the dictator says or you get executed.

However, Google isn’t the only game in town. Over the last month Affiliate Confession has received more than 7,000 visits and more than 12,000 page views, but just 8.5% of that traffic has come from Google. The bulk of that traffic or 19.5% has come from direct visitors, people who come directly to Affiliate Confession without being filtered through a search engine, another blog, Entrecard or some other source. At times I have even received huge boosts in traffic from social media type sites such as StumbleUpon and Digg.

Google has positioned themselves as though the masses, and webmasters more specifically, are beholden to the playground of the Internet they have created for us. When the decision makers at Google issued the bizarre decree that webmasters were henceforth going to be punished for selling text links on their sites, that just made my blood boil, but I have yet to speak up about it. I don’t sell and have never sold links on any site I’ve run in the 4 years I’ve been making money online and it still made me furious. Then just yesterday, John from JTPratt’s Blogging Mistakes left a comment where he stated in part:

I worry about google penalties every day, and they are penalizing whole sites for doing paid reviews. Anyone who even mentions Pay Per Post gets penalized now. I had a BizRate widget on one of my sites with all nofollow links and I got a 1 year penalty to PR0 and supplemental index in google. Once I removed that widget when my contract with Bizrate was up – within 3 days I was Pagerank 4 and back in the index.

That comment just got me thinking how dependent we’ve become on one entity in this whole Internet game. And yes, many of us are dependent on Google for much of our livelyhood whether it be through Adsense or them sending lots of traffic our way. If it weren’t for Google in many aspects, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do and have the benefit of working at home.

But back to the text link debate, I think the whole issue stems from the fact that Google doesn’t want webmasters to sell links because that’s their business with Adwords. Let’s face it, Google makes boatloads of cash from lots of people losing money on Adwords and if Google penalizes high traffic sites that sell text links, more people will have to continue to get traffic via Adwords, even if they lose money in the process. You may think that’s a dumb theory, but it is a known fact that people lose thousand of dollars just trying to figure out how to use Adwords and then they need to find a niche to be profitable in.

What has made this blog relatively easy to write has been the fact that I think of writing as more of a conversation than trying to find a keyword, and get it in the title, and make sure it’s in the first paragraph and make sure I don’t link out to something bad, and make sure I kiss up to Google every way I can so they might bless me with some traffic. Okay, I do that with most of my affiliate sites because want that traffic, but even then you never know what’s going to happen. For example, one of my vacation blogs was getting about 80 people a day from Google and hadn’t been updated since mid November, so I posted an entry thinking I would get even more traffic. Unfortunately that was a bad decision. For the last week I’ve received about 8 to 10 people a day from Google to that site. So much for trying to please them, I did nothing but update my blog and lost 90% of my traffic.

What it all boils down to is that I’m just not going to play the game with Google on this blog because I don’t have to. I enjoy writing and explaining what I do on the net to earn money and if Google would like people to know about that, they can send me some and if not, I’ll just rely on my readers and social marketing to get the word out.

Oh, by the way, my Featured Sites links are do follow.

Popularity: 5% [?]

The Massive Entrecard Advertising Experiment ended a few days ago (advertising ran out earlier than expected) and the results are somewhat different than anticipated. Just to review, I accumulated 8,000 Entrecard credits around mid February and in a mad advertising blitz, spent every last one of them in about 4 days time, placing 13 days worth of advertising to test out the viability of the networking and advertising system.

The test was purely to see how many visitors I could get via advertising through Entrecard, instead of dropping cards. I was looking to test it as an advertising medium only. I didn’t completely stop dropping cards during the experiment, but I did not go out of my way to do so. If I was on a blog that had the widget, I would drop my card, otherwise I did not go to the Entrecard interface and just drop cards to earn points. See advertising clicks below:

The goal of the test was to gain 75 new rss readers to a new total of 226 and have 250 unique visitors per day. While the traffic increased to that unique visitor goal, the rss reader goal was off by a large margin. Rss readers reached a high of 193, while visitors averaged 263 per day over the course of the experiment.

Massive Entrecard Advertising Experiment Stats:

Entrecard credits used: 8,000
Number of advertisements placed: 180
Days to run advertising: 13
Average number of ads shown per day: 14
Total number of visitors from ads: 934
Total advertising visitors according to Google Analytics: 658
Average visitors per day from ads: 72
Time spent placing ads: 10 hours
Visitors per hour of work: 93

As mentioned earlier, the results were different than expected mostly because of the additional cards that were dropped on my blog during the time ads we running. Have a look at the trend below:

I can only assume many of the clicks on advertising I placed were Entrecard users as well and they dropped their cards while visiting this blog.

Conclusion:

While I did get a few visitors from all the ads placed, it doesn’t seem like the average of 72 additional per day paid off in the end. What I find most disturbing about the whole Entrecard experiment is that Google Analytics is showing me 30% less visitors than what the Entrecard stats are showing. This huge inconsistency makes me very suspect as to what’s really going on with their reporting and the viability of the whole system. You may also notice that of the 180 ads I placed, only 105 brought me traffic.

Spending 10 hours to get a supposed 93 visitors, with a bounce rate of 85%, per hour of work, hardly seems like it’s worth the effort. I think my time would have been much better spent leaving comments on my favorite blogs and adding to or starting discussions in forums.

I’m also having difficulty with the entire economy of Entrecard as well. Blogs like JohnChow.com and Problogger.net that have Alexa rankings 80,000 places higher than the most costly advertising spots at Entrecard, cost about one third the price to advertise on as the top spots do. That’s just insane and several people must be hosing the system. You have to be able to get your money’s worth out of online media or the whole thing will collapse (kind of makes you think of Google Adwords).

Because of the difficulty of finding blogs that fit my original criteria for advertising on, I eventually ended up going to the appropriate categories for my blog, staring at the bottom and working my way up the category till I got to blogs that cost around 30 or 40 credits to advertise on. Being that the few blogs I spent more than 300 credits for apparently produced next to no results (not showing up in my top 10), this seems to be the better way to advertise. You can get a massive amount of advertising with 1,000 credits and by placing ads on blogs that cost between 2 to 15 credits. All I’m looking for now is a blog that has a decently placed widget and doesn’t have a grayed out Google page rank.

After my advertising effort produced dismal results and the outrageous cost of the top ad spots, seemingly the best thing to do is to blanket the system with cheap advertising. Unless you know for sure a high priced ad will produce good results, this looks to be the best system. I believe Entrecard advertising would be a much better value if ads were shown for 48 hours instead of the present 24 hours. Too much time is spent finding good advertising only to have it used up in a day. Saturday traffic on the net is notoriously low and if that’s the day an expensive ad is scheduled to show, tough luck because you don’t have any control over it.

I will continue to use Entrecard for the time being because of the networking results it has produced. Meeting other bloggers, trading ideas, getting mentioned on other blogs and returning the favor has been worth the effort of being an Entrecard member, even if the advertising side of things has produced dismal results.

Popularity: 6% [?]