How do you market your blog?
I’ve been on EntreCard, what - four days now. I’d hardly call myself an expert, but I’ve had a pretty good time playing around with it over the past few days and I thought I’d share my experiences with you and give you an idea of how I’m approaching it.
I’m not suggesting that what I’m doing is the best way to use EntreCard (I’m still learning), but what I hope to do here is give other new users a few ideas about how to get started, and maybe entice some more experienced EntreCard users to leave some comments with further suggestions.
It won’t take you long to realise that you can’t do much without EntreCard Credits (EC’s), but fortunately it doesn’t take long to get your hands on a few and start spending them.
Every time you ‘drop’ your EntreCard in a widget on another blog, you earn 1 EC, so once you’ve got your profile setup go ahead and drop a few cards and earn some credits. The cheapest ads you can buy on other blogs cost 2 EC’s - most of these are really new blogs with no traffic, but they could also be established blogs that have just signed up to EntreCard, so there may be a few gems in there. Don’t expect much from the cheap ads, but it’s a nice way to get used to how things work.
That’s basically how I spent most of my first couple of days - dropping cards on other blogs and buying cheap ads, the most I paid was 32 EC’s, but most of the ones I bought were in the 2-8 EC range (anything that cost more than 2 EC I tried to look for blogs that had a some comments on their last few posts). I spent around 200 EC’s all up, on about 20 ads (8 of which have already run or are currently running).
After an initial play with the system, things naturally progressed to ‘chain dropping’… which is one of the things I really don’t like about the EntreCard system (chain dropping just encourages hit and run traffic IMO), but if you want to build up some credits from scratch, it’s probably your best option.
My approach here was to click on the ‘campaign’ tab (brings up a list of sites you can advertise on), look for a category that was related to my blog and open up about 5 of those sites in my browser. From there it was just a matter of dropping your card, clicking on the ad being shown and dropping your card on the next blog that loads… in the space of 5-10mins you will have dropped about 70-90 cards (I think you can do up to 300 a day, but it gets boring quick!).
Timing couldn’t be better at the moment - Entrecard are giving away 2000 credits, to anyone who blogs about their new features and free ebook… it’s a really easy way to earn credits. I blogged about it here, and on my other blog KeywordSEM.com and received my free credits last night… I now have more EC’s than I know what to do with!
All the details about how you can earn those 2000 EC’s can be found here (if you haven’t blogged about it already, I highly recommend it).
Over the last 24hrs I’ve ditched the chain dropping and progressed to something a little more constructive (marginally anyway). It still involves a lot of ‘hit and run’ dropping, but there are a few positives.
After a day or two of chain dropping, you’ll start to get a lot of people returning the drop on your blog (which also earns you 1 EC), I had something like 54 people drop on my blog yesterday. This gives you the basis of a nice little network (you know these people are active on EntreCard, and that they’ve dropped on your blog).
Click on the ‘Drops Inbox’ tab (on your dashboard) and where it says ’show’, select ‘cards you haven’t dropped on’. That’ll list all the blogs that have dropped a card on you (I think during the last week?), but you haven’t dropped on them today… it’s quick work to click on all of those and drop your card.
It might sound pretty similar to chain dropping, but I think there are some key differences:
I’m not convinced that this is the best way to use EntreCard (it’s still generating a lot of useless traffic), but I think it’s worth pursuing for awhile until I find something better… and if you have more than one blog, I recommend linking them on the one EntreCard account. There is a little bit of mucking around switching between the two, but it’ll allow you to drop one card for each of your blogs on a site.
All that brings me to where I am now… sitting on a heap of EC’s that I need to figure out what to do with. Here are my options as I see them:
I’m currently leaning towards a contest… I’d like to do something that addresses the quality of traffic and maybe generate some incoming links to my blog, besides - I’m sure it will be a heap of fun too!.
I’d love to hear your suggestions… anyone got some good ideas for a contest?
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I am amazed that someone does the exact same thing I do.
I have 5 pages up and go through them 1 by 1 opening up another once I have finished. That way I make sure I am on the persons webpage for over 30 seconds. However I just started giving back to the ones that give to me. I didn’t know how to do it till about a week ago.
One thing I hate is that they changed it so you have to open a page and it opens up on the page your clicking from in EC. Thats how I found out about drop boxes b/c there was no way I was going to do it the old way I started. It would have taken me all day just to do 300 ec’s.
I like your post everyone should read it so they get moving faster doing their ec’s.
ttyl,
Mya
Hi Mya - Always good to know that others are doing things the same as you :)
It took me a couple of days to find the drops inbox too, for the first couple of days I was trying to keep up with those shown on the summary page, but that’s not really an effective way to do it as you only get the last 15 and can’t get back to the ones that dropped on you the day before etc. Using the drops inbox saves a lot of time and definitely helps you to network a bit more.
Hi Martin. I’m from Crovess Blog, an Entrecard member who drops on you everyday. Err I think I didn’t miss a day dropping you EC right?
Inbox feature comes in handy for a EC dropping routine job. Also, commenting after dropping an EC for a member is a good idea to build relationship with each others. Because I believe no one wants to ‘chain dropping’ forever without any relationships and regular visitors or readers.
Everytime when I come to drop EC on you, I find some interesting posts and information I wanna read. This time I decided to stopped by and give a comment.
Thanks for all the sharing and stay in touched.
Hi Kevin - thanks for dropping by (and commenting!).
I’ve been dropping at your blog the last few days too, and although I haven’t commented there (yet), I recognised the name of your blog as soon as you mentioned it and can remember reading a couple of your posts.
One of the important things I’ve noticed is that you really need content that stands out on your blog… you don’t need the best design in the world, but as long as your post headlines stand out and are easy to read, I’ll always skim through the titles and see if there is anything there that I want to read. Your Crovess Blog does that quite well Kevin, but there are a lot that I’ve been dropping on that make it very hard to find and process the content… those blogs make it very hard to stick around.
Hi Martin. Good afternoon. If I’m right, it’s about 1pm over there at your place? Thanks for your comment about my blog. Yeah I do really need some good contents hehe. I’m kinda new to blogging anyway and there’s a lot that I need to learn from you, and perhaps any other bloggers on the internet about blogging and seo’ing. See ya soon.
The timezone in Brisbane is GMT+10, so it’s currently 10am on a lazy Sunday here :)
You’ve got some good stuff on your blog, like I said, I have read some posts (and commented on one a bit earlier today), keeping at it is the key, you’ll find an audience if you’re persistent and listen to your comments (if a post you write generates a lot of comments, then try to write more posts like that, or on similar themes etc.)
(Quick edit: My timezone is GMT+10, not -10 like I posted earlier… it’s obviously a more lazy Sunday morning than usual, lol).
hi!
it was actually your post that got me curious about the big deal on the new feature… that was the only time I checked my dashboard and read the new feature (silly me.. )
that’s when I learned about the contest, so following your lead, I made a post in my blog! and easily got 2,000 EC credits! I was so thrilled that I even bragged about it!
yes, comments are good. it somehow create a link between bloggers. I’d like to thank you for commenting on mine, because it encouraged others to comment as well, hehe..
anyway, i’ve said quite a mouthful, see you ’round ;)
Roy
The Struggling Blogger