Fact: I found your site by using EntreCard. I stuck around to read some of your articles. They bored me. And while I am not a typical 14 year old kid with ADD that needs pictures to help explain things to him, I would have appreciated at least a graphic or two connected with the articles to at least help illustrate your point. By the third paragraph, I was bored and moved on.

Your “beautiful blog” is covered in so much advertising that makes it look cheap and fly-by-night. Im sure you make a few bucks in Adsense and other affiliate programs, but from the looks of your Alexa charts, it looks like you haven’t been able to do anything to draw in new people. You have hovered around the same number for the last six months. Your rank is on an up-swing now, but looking at your history, it tells me that its only a brief spike and will soon start down the other side of the bell curve. This suggests to me that any ideas you may have posted about how to make money online aren’t worth the time it took me to write this sentence.

The “trash traffic” you mention coming from EntreCard is due to the fact that everyone that visits your blog seems to be able to sum it up in about 2 seconds and then moves on. Although there may be something substantial under the surface, one thing I have learned is that perception is reality and the perception is that your site isnt worth reading.

None of your strategies seem even the least bit different to any one of several million different “make money online” websites out there, all saying the exact same thing, the exact same way.

According to your graphs, you were with EntreCard for a total of nine whole days. That is not nearly enough time to quantitatively analyze the data provided,but it appears that while you were happy to show the other three graphs, you conveniently neglected to show how many cards you dropped on other sites, or how many ads you placed on other higher-profile sites to attract viewers.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but my marketing efforts with my site have definitely improved thanks to Entrecard. My Alexa reach has gone up 7,000 perecent and I have managed to drop over 200,000 points in my rankings using nothing else but Entrecard for my marketing efforts (and a couple of posts that happened to make it to Fark).

There have been improvements to the dashboard on the EC site and the other objections seem trivial, so I wont bother to mention them.

I am not an agent of EntreCard, but rather just see a lot of flawed logic to your reasons for saying the system sucks. Perhaps you would be happier doing all the marketing efforts by yourself, trying to drive content to your site.

But then, I doubt I would have found your site in the first place, let alone hung around long enough to post a reply to something you wrote.

Best of luck on going it alone.

Keep up the good work!

-Bec

I also find some cool and interesting sites through EC, like this one which I did not know about until I saw you on EntreCard. In defense of those that drop and run, I too have clicked on a site and new within 5 seconds that there wasn’t anything there for me, so that does happen.

P.S.- as a first time visitor here, just want to say great job & I’ll be back.

I’m relatively new to blogging. I’ve been getting 10-20 hits per day until entrecard. Entrecard has given me over a thousand hits. Now, you may say the bounce rate is high, and it is.

But, I’ve received over 40 comments. So a good deal of people are staying long enough to comment. To me, the comments I’m getting alone are worth the small price of a 125×125 space on my blog.

I got a free spot on John Chow, and I got a free spot on problogger. I couldn’t afford that kind of advertising if my life depended on it!

I write recommendations for people on Entrecard when I like their site, and they turn into readers of my blog.

So I can see why a blogger like you may not like it, you have bigger and better things to do. But to a smaller blogger like me just getting started, it really is indespensible. I don’t know what I would do without it actually. This is why I disagree with your analysis: most of your readers are smaller bloggers like me, and to them, this thing is going to be really useful.

Perfect example though: I found this blog through Entrecard. Hadn’t heard of you before that. And here I am commenting. Again.

See my point? Would you rather it send you 1 hit per day, who stays 5 minutes and leaves a comment, or 100 hits a day, 99 drop their card and take a quick glance-nothing catches their eye, and 1 stays 5 minutes and leaves a comment.

Still, it’s a pity that the vast majority of clicks are just to drop off cards, which makes it just like any other traffic exchange (only generally good for stats).