Retro Yakking

Since it’s kind of an unofficial EntreCard butt-kissing day, I thought I’d share with you some of my thoughts on this relatively new blog publicity tool. A couple of months ago I suggested an EntreCard beginner’s strategy over at my other blog, but since I’m not really updating that these days I thought I’d post a follow-up here instead.

Relative success

Entrecard has brought me 3900 unique hits in January and 3700 so far in February. Well, it has been a shorter month - a few more days and no doubt that figure would have easily surpassed the January total.

This is due, in part, to my increased use of the advertising function in February. Since the end of December, I concentrated on dropping on other blogs to collect as many credits as possible with which to advertise, without really knowing exactly what I was going to do with them.

I came to the conclusion that an EntreCard credits contest would be a bit out of place on this blog, and I’m not really a fan of entering competitions in general: there is a low probability that any prosperity at all will result, and I’d rather be writing informative blog posts.

The strategy

So, when I came across a suggested advertising strategy at Turnip of Power, I thought I would put those credits to good use.

The beauty of this method, however, meant that I didn’t actually need to have many credits to spare to get started with it: credits earned from dropping 300 cards a day in addition to another 100 or so received from drops back would most likely have been sufficient. This makes it ideal for any level of user, even if you can’t always manage the 300 a day max.

I will not completely repeat the details of strategy in this post (you can read Turnip’s whole post here), but it basically involves making effective use of the 2EC blogs in combination with a few other advertising tips I’ve picked up along the way via experience:

• Don’t be afraid to buy the 2EC advertising slots. You may think these are useless, but if you buy up, say, forty (Cost: 80EC, not even a third of a day’s dropping), I’ll bet this will earn you at least fifteen reciprocal drops from blog owners and maybe a few advertising hits here and there if you’re lucky.
• Skim through the low cost blogs in the directory, ordering the cards by most popular. Look for and buy ones that have a high popularity rating compared to their price. For 4EC, 25+; 8 EC, 50+; 16EC, 100+; 32, 250+.
• And of course, regularly check for the newest blogs. EntreCard check and accept submissions in batches, meaning you may get about six or nine new blogs appearing within about 20 minutes of each other. If you can, snap these up at a cost of 2, 4 or 8EC - they’re more than worth the price if you can catch them cheap.

It’s worth repeating that the popularity rating given on the top right corner of the cards only represents how much coverage that blog is getting within the EntreCard network, when the actual popularity could be much higher, or even minimal outside EntreCard.

Statistics

As EntreCard members are prone to repeating, it’s all a numbers game. The graph above shows that, although the numbers fluctuate, there has been a gradual increase in advert clicks over the course of the month.

A nice side effect is that you get a few extra drops back, too. Since I began advertising extensively, I have found that the average number of drops on my blog per day has increased by a couple of hundred. This means an extra 200 points per day to spend on advertising, give away in blog contests, or whatever you like.

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