Admitably, Entrecard’s pretty good
Posted by multippt
Looking at other Entrecard users, I’m pretty amazed at how well the free ad publishing service has grown. Although the thought of Flash advertisements isn’t very new, how about “free” advertisements? You may think no one wants to put on advertisement if they don’t earn money from it, but Entrecard probably is about to change that concept here. Entrecard figured that out, and thus made the killer feature - purchase advertisements from other blogs at entirely no cash at all (mind you, some popular blogs like ShoeMoney are biting this too, though only temporarily).
The trade-off is this: the entire advertising system is dependent on a “currency” called Entrecard Credits (i.e. EC) which you must use to “buy” advertising that lasts for only 1 day. 1 day may be pretty short, but it might be worth it on a mega blog since it isn’t a PPC ad.
Getting those credits doesn’t require you to work your sweat off it. No, it doesn’t any cash at all. Rather, you get paid to advertise your site. Pretty cool right? Getting paid to advertise your own site (via “dropping” your Entrecard into other sites). Of course, you get paid when other people does the same, or advertises their site to you. You’ll also get paid for the obvious - people buying advertisement off your site. Getting snagged is pretty easy, especially for new users. New users get the opportunity of being publicized. If users find your site interesting (or more importantly, popular and active), then chances are you’ll receive a whole lot of offers.
The cost of advertising on each site differs as well. It is determined on how many “cards” people have dropped into that site, with more cards resulting in a higher cost to display ads on the site.
What Entrecard lacks
A main reason why Entrecard is not used by many sites around is because it doesn’t pay in cash. However, it does offer new webmasters who are unable to have any cash available to give their site a little advertising opportunity. It also brings in some free traffic to your site too. But the part on not being paid for the clicks are quite discouraging.
The idea of paying nothing for advertising is nice, but if there are not many popular blogs or sites which use Entrecard, the advertisement is limited to medium and small-scale sites. Certainly a bummer if you were hoping to get your little site exposed on some mega sites (currently only possible on larger advertising companies like Google).
It uses IFrames. Meaning, it’s impossible to style the card, unless you get really creative…
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P.S., on a rare note, looks like Entrecard still goofs-up once in every while.
