Entrecard – free advertising on top blogs!

With the use of virtual business cards, sized at 125×125, Entrecard works by letting Entrecard users trade business cards with each other, which is referred to as dropping. When a user drops a card on a blog or receives a card drop on his own blog, one credit is generated to both the receiver and sender. Once several credits have been accumlated, users can use these credits to advertise on other users blogs.

Looking at the image below, on the right, you can see my Entrecard (The picture of the man). There are two important things to note here:

• “Drop Yours” – this is for other bloggers to drop their virtual business cards. They would simply click the button and both the dropper and myself would receive a credit. There are no popups or page refreshes on clicking the button, so the process is simple as quick.
• The actual card, outlined in red, is a ‘paid’ advertisement. This blogger asked if he could advertise on my blog for x number of credits, and I chose to approve him. Therefore he buys my space and gets some exposure on my blog.

Each user gets a dashboard, which shows all the important stats required to use Entrecard. The one part which I found a little confusing was how to go about determining how the system assigned your ‘price’, ie. the cost for a user to advertise on my blog. This system is controlled by the number of times the Entrecard being featured on your blog gets clicked. In the image again, each time the advert, outlined in red, is clicked, my advertising ‘price’ increases, therefore costing users more to advertise on my blog.

The dashboard allows a blogger to control everything. There are four columns which control your system. The left column, ‘Advertisers’, shows all the adverts, where bloggers have asked to advertise on your blog. You have the option to approve and reject offers. The second column, ‘Your Ads’, shows you where you have asked to advertise on when your advert will be displayed on another blog. Note: all adverts accepted, run for 24hrs on the bloggers blog. The third column, ‘On your widget’, shows the current advert being displayed on your website, as well as the adverts still to be displayed on your blog, queue style. The forth column, ‘Inbox’, is rather irrelevant, so I will not go into that.

To advertise on a blog, you simply head on over the the ‘Campaign’ section, and by using the tools, ‘By Category, Most Recent, Most Popular, Most Recommended, Lowest Wait’, you will be able to browse through all the virtual cards and opt on which ones you would like to advertise on. When looking to advertise, there are three states virtual cards may be in, as shown below, ‘Advertise’, ‘Spot Full’, ‘Ad queue Full’ – these will show you whether you are able to book an advertising spot or not. Each virtual card also indicates the cost in credits to advertise on the bloggers Entrecard and the number of days until your virtual card will be displayed. Obviously the more popular a virtual card, the longer and more expensive it will be to aquire a spot – so shop carefully.

Entrecard is being used by some of the very well known online players such as Joel Comm, John Chow and Darren Rowse from Problogger! With leading players like this using Entrecard, it gives everyone a chance to advertise on some of the most traffic hungry websites, rather than having to pay a fortune for a small advertising space.

Sign up now, give it a bash, I’ve seen a decent traffic increase thus far :)