For any new blog, Entrecard is a Godsend. Entrecard will provide you unlimited free advertising, help you with your Alexa ranking (which can be helpful for selling ad space on your blog), help you make friends with other blog owners (which is essential for generating those all important backlinks). These are just a few of the reasons why any new blog should join Entrecard.
But because Entrecard is a fantastic, easy to use blog promotion tool, I think a lot of people are simply forgetting that there’s a world outside of Entrecard. Entrecard can be quite a big time killer. Dropping 300 cards a day isn’t exactly a 30 second job is it? If you want your advertising campaigns to be successful, you have to go out and find the rite blogs to advertise on. This is another major time killer. You might be a bit of a forum addict? So, like all good forums addicts, you might spend time reading and replying to many different topics. Yet again, very time consuming. A good part of your evening or what ever amount of time you spend online, is going to be taken up by Entrecard.
So, with all of your time spent focussing on Entrecard you’re going to be neglecting other important areas of blog promotion and development. I understand that for a lot of people Entrecard is all they really need. But my blog is about making money from blogging, I need to reach out and expose myself to a much broader audience. Over the last week or so, I’ve found myself neglecting the following areas:
- SEO
- Blogcatalog
- High quality link building
- Affiliate marketing
- Technorati
- My Pay Per Post Project
- Blog/website related forums
I know without Entrecard my blog wouldn’t be receiving half as many hits as it does. But admit it, Entrecard traffic isn’t exactly the best type of traffic is it? So, I’m sacrificing so many important areas of blog promotion and development, just for the sake of trying to reach the popular section of EC, and making my Google Analytics charts look a little busier with all those 30 second card dropping visits.
I know for definite, cutting back on my EC drops and general activity on EC will damage my traffic, but if I put as much effort in to the non EC areas, I’m confident I will gain all that traffic back. And hopefully this new traffic will be on Funk13 to read my blog, not to simply drop a card. No offence to anyone who does power drop. 
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March 13th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
The golden rule in ANY website is to never EVER rely on one or two sources of traffic. You have to go out, cultivate links to your posts (usually by writing something worth linking to), then find the community(ies) that are actively blogging within your niche, network, do SEO to a minor extent, and of course build a solid base of subscribers. The foundation is always going to be to write something that is of interest. If you do, the other bloggers will find you, the search engines will find you, and the readers will find you.
March 15th, 2008 at 7:01 am
Great tips.
Thx for sharing. Time to check out your blog.
March 23rd, 2008 at 10:23 pm
I got entrecard today and I’m curious what the possibilities are of this tool besides slowing down my page load time :o)
I really wouldn’t want to spend time dropping 300 cards a day … ouhf… blogging is such a time consuming thing