EntreCard

Making your EntreCard

2008-08-10T22:29:00.000-07:00

Your 125 x 125 Entrecard will set you apart from other bloggers. But it will also give people a pre-look into the nature of your blog. You don't want to mislead people, otherwise the people who might like your blog will miss it and the people who don't like it may be lead in, just wasting everyones time (including your own for your hard work on your blog!)

This site has some free cool pictures already sized to 125 x 125:

http://free125cards.com/

There's also a list of other free graphics here, but they're not presized to 125 x 125. Two really good free image editors to help you resize and customize your Card are GIMP and Paint.NET.

Selling Ad Spaces

2008-01-07T22:09:00.001-08:00

Five Tips

1. Make sure you visit the site and look around before accepting their ad, linking to pop-up window sites, full-page ad sites, and especially spam sites reduces your credibility.

2. If you think your visitors will mind, don't sell ad spaces to unrelated places.

3. The latest offer from an advertiser is likely the highest price, so approving it will earn you the most credits. It will appear at the bottom of the list.

4. Make sure your ad requests box doesn't stay full. If nothing else, reject some ads with "Other" as the reason and tell them to try again later. That will make sure when your ad space goes up in price, there will be room for people to request an ad for that space.

5. Drop off your EntreCard at others blogs, they will often return the favor, then your ad space will go up in price and you can sell it for more per day.

6. Make sure you're buying ad spaces too. When people see your image on other EntreCard users blogs, they'll click on it, come to your site, then drop their card on yours too, boosting your ad space price.

Buying Ad Spaces

2008-01-07T21:43:00.000-08:00

Basic

1. Make sure the place you're buying from has their Entrecard near the top of their page, so users don't have to scroll down to see it, especially very far down to see your ad.

2. Judge their traffic: Do a quick scan, see how many comments they're getting, if they have a page counter on their site, or even better; see how many subscribers they have if they have a FeedBurner subscriber image.

Advanced

1. Judge their traffic even more: Go to Alexa.com and type in their domain name, see how many visitors they get, or go to pr.blogflux.com and chexed out what their Google Page rank. Don't rely on those completely, sometimes newer blogs with traffic wont show up in Alexa or with Google Page Rank

2. If someone doesn't have their EntreCard near the top of their page, it may still be worth the EntreCredits if they get a lot of traffic.

Cheap Advertising

2008-01-07T21:36:00.001-08:00

Two Tips

1. Click "Campaign" to launch your ads, then click the "most recent" tab, and buy all of the available spots up (after checking to make sure they have the card on their site.

2. Choose the category or categories most related to your website, then scroll to the bottom of each list. The cheapest ad slots will be there.

Quick EntreCredits

2008-01-07T21:33:00.000-08:00

Two Methods:
1. Speed Dropping pages is great because it goes as fast as you can go and it's easy to get started, but it's bad because there are a few bumps in the road using this method.

Download or embed the speed dropping video.

Be prepared for these small setbacks with the speed dropping method; Some people don't have fast loading pages, their EntreCard isn't above the fold (don't have to scroll down) on their page, there's not an active ad on their page, in which case clicking their ad will take you to the site you're already on, and lastly you have to close out the previous windows or your computer may start going slow. Just watch the video though, it's pretty fast.

2. Bookmark pages that load fast with their Entrecard positioned near the top of their page, then revisit them each day for quick "card drops" so you can earn quick credits. Here's a fantastic list of Entrecard users with their card "above the fold."

Eventually, you will likely read some of the blogs too and possibly become interested too, so you will benefit in more way than one. Those same people will also see that you're dropping cards on them often, and may return the favor, boosting the price of your advertising space. Eventually someone will be buying your Entrecard ad space for 100 Entrecard credits, and you wont have to drop as many cards to get credits.

While many people (including myself and most of the links below) return "drops," some people put a blog badge on their site to make sure people know they return drops. They call it the "u drop i follow" movement. You can find a lot of sites and even get your site added to the list here. Keep a look out for logos like this:

Some "above the fold" sites that load fast to get you started with bookmarking are

If you have toolbars installed OR are using a lower resolution than the standard 1024x768 it may push the Entrecards slightly below the fold.

If you're using FireFox, you might want to check out this bookmark list to import!

Signing Up

2008-01-07T21:24:00.000-08:00

When you first sign up on entrecard.com to get web traffic, accept only ONE advertising offer the first day. You will only earn about 4 credits from them, something you can earn in less than a minute 1 minute of "Speed Dropping" on other peoples websites.

That advertisement will stay on your blog for one day. So when you go back to your EntreCard, cancel all of the pending adverts except the last one (most likely to be the highest paying). A maximum of about 7 advertisements can be pending for your advertisement spot at any given time, so you don't want people who want to pay 10, 20, or 60 credits unable to place a request because people who already sent requests in for 4 or 6 are taking up those spots, since after an advert request has been sent in, if the price goes up, their initial request only spends how much it was at the time they requested it. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell you how many credits each request was sent in for, but if you know how many credits your spot was worth when the request was placed, you can figure out how much they tried to advertise on your site for.