- Image via CrunchBase
I have been reading about all the changes over at Entrecard. People are in a tizzy about the paid ads and the management of the changeover and a whole bunch of other issues that I had no idea about. Yesterday, when I stopped by Crotchedy Old Man’s site, I learned that there was a boycott of dropping going on that day. When I found out I immediately stopped my dropping.
It was wonderful. No guilt. I turned off my computer and found something else to do. Granted it was only watching Live Free or Die Hard but I painted my nails while watching instead of surf the Internet to some sites that I love and a whole bunch I could care less about.
I have been considering dropping (no pun) Entrecard for a while now. Not because of the changes but because the weather is getting warmer and the day is longer and I can’t see being cooped up in the office when it is so nice outside. My ass is also twice the size it was when I started using Entrecard and if that isn’t a good enough reason to stop I don’t know what is.
I started using Entrecard to get more people to my blog. I want to earn money off this blog and the only way to do that is to have more visitors. Regardless of what all those SEO sites tell you, and with their broken English it isn’t easy to figure out what they are trying to tell anyone, the only way to get more people clicking on your ads, aside from telling them to which you are not allowed to do, is by getting more and more people to your site. It’s really a numbers game. That said, I found some wonderful new blogs. Using Entrecard opened up the blogoshphere for me. I had been visiting the same old blogs each day and Entrecard expanded that world immensely. Entrecard has been a great tool to get to the sites I love everyday. Of course there are feeds for that. I just haven’t gotten in the habit of looking at my reader each day. Something I plan on changing.
I’m not saying I will no longer use Entrecard, I have five blogs and most of them are unknown so I might still use it for those blogs. In the five hours I gain each day by not dropping I can actually concentrate on my writing and editing which are two things that have sucked lately. There simply hasn’t been time to write quality content when I have hours and hours of dropping to get caught up on.
My count will suffer for this. I’m sure it will be hit hard. However, my bounce rate will benefit as hopefully the people who visit will actually read what I have to say rather than spend a split second looking for my widget and then leaving. I don’t need that kind of traffic even though I feel loved when I look at the number visitors climb higher. I’ll have to get over it.
While Entrecard broadened my horizons I’m still stuck in the same neighborhood of other Entrecard users. It’s a considerably larger neighborhood but I rarely venture out of it and I can’t grow my blog if I don’t reach beyond it. So I plan on going to my favorites still, blogs like Sanity on Edge, Crotchety Old Man Yells at Cars, I Do Things So You Don’t Have To, Unfinished Rambler, Amy Oops, Soggy Doggy Bloggy, The Humor Smith Chronicle, Humor Bloggers, The Maaaa of Pricilla, Of Cabbages and Kings, Frogs in My Formula, and these are just a few. There are so many more blogs that I could list and I will in the coming days. But I also plan on visiting sites outside of this little part of the web. I’m going to stalk the commenters on these blogs who I have never heard of before. Then I am going to read their blogs, comment on them if I have something to say and hopefully lure them back to this blog. I plan on using the hours that I would waste dropping expanding my horizons even more.
I’m going to list five blogs that are not in the Entrecard community. I encourage you to visit these sites and get to know them and their readers. If you like this idea please list five of your own favorites outside the network. Feel free to credit me with the idea.
Life on Planet Bill
Cranial Hyperossification
Nanny Goats in Panties
Bad Parking
Ok, so I am only gonna list four, see, this is how bad it has gotten. If you have any recommendations for blogs that are interesting and that are not in the EC community please leave the URL in the comment. This is pathetic, I should know of more blogs than this that are outside the EC community.
I wholeheartedly agree about the amount of time spent dropping. Which is why I don’t.
Entrecard is a great way to find new blogs, but it isn’t the only way.
I haven’t decided, yet, about Entrecard. I don’t have a problem with the paid ads, but I do notice that, if I don’t spend the hours dropping, I don’t generate traffic.
There’s got to be a better way to do this.
Thank you for the link love! I appreciate it. I, too, have found many great blogs through EC when I was a member. I felt guilty for not reyturning drops on my moth faithful droppers. Then EC started their crap so I quit! I now am able to spend more time doing quality reading of my favorite sites such as your and not have to worry about returning drops and leaving comments on pages that I can not relate.
Your idea is a great one! I just might do that, as I have not given much link love lately.
Thanks againfor your and congrats from weaning from the EC crack pipe
I have found http://wheelersrabbithillfarm.blogspot.com/
which I love ’cause it is about having a small farm which is well, what I have…
I will try and list more but I gotta go milk the goats…
Mother, I keep racking my brain about better ways to generate traffic. I still think the best way is to go to other sites and comment, comment on the people who comment on your site (sorry I haven’t done that on yours in a while) and visit the people who visit their sites. I think a community is necessary, we all need to have each other’s backs so to speak and can promote the ones that are great but there has to be a better way to meet more of the bloggers that we don’t already know.
Dizz, thank you for being such a consistant commenter here. You are one of my top commenters and you make me feel loved. How long did it take for you to get the monkey off your back. It’s been only a couple of hours for me and I really feel the urge to drop.
Pricilla, I’ll check that one out, if it is half as much fun as your blog it will be a great find.
I’m still on the fence with EC. I never, EVER dropped 300 a day, not even close. I did it when I felt like it, sometimes sticking around to read, sometimes not. It’s a tool that you can use however you like.
I use iGoogle as my home page and have a widget that shows all the recent posts from the blogs I subscribe to. So I always have those blogs in front of me.
Let’s see if I can find some good non-EC blogs:
Florida Girl in Sydney is a HOOT!
http://www.floridagirlinsydney.com/
Christa at Giggle On! is wacky and inspirational:
http://www.giggleon.com/
Jeff at View from the Cloud is funny and always interesting:
http://www.viewfromthecloud.com/
Spiritual Evolution of the Bean has amazing art and reviews of pens, paper, and other artists’ tools:
http://www.biffybeans.com/
Seafood Punch has AMAZING illustrations:
http://seafoodpunch.com/
I just started reading Sanctimony:
http://sanctimony.net/
Bad Music Videos is hilarious:
http://badmusicvideos.wordpress.com/
That’s enough for now.
Happy reading!
Ooh! Thanks JD these look like fun.
I went Entrecard light awhile ago. It was just too much to keep sitting here maniaclly dropping cards on blogs and never having enough time to actually read them any more. What was the point of visiting at all? So I stoppped dropping pretty much. Kept the widget and accepted ads. Still do. But the new plan for EC doesn’t seem to fit in with my ideal of a social network. I may give up on Entrecard but I don’t want to. 🙂
Have a look at CMF Ads. It’s kind of the same as Entrecard in ways but there is no card dropping.
Laura, I have both CMF and Adgetize. I get more visitors from Adgetize and they pay me on top of it. I recommend Adgetize. There is dropping involved but much less than entrecard.
I removed (or tried to) my five blogs from entrecard on March 16. It effectively freed up a good five hours of time daily. Like you I am enjoying my new found freedom. Commenting is one of the best ways to let the author you stopped by and it’s even more personal than dropping your card 🙂
I have a fat ass, as well. A contributing factor is EC because I always think while I’m dropping cards, I could be doing aerobics or something. Blogging in general has gotten my ass where it is today.
That said, I’m on the fence about leaving EC. I’ll be honest and say that it’s driven a lot of traffic to my blog and a lot of the people who keep coming back as regulars are EC’ers themselves. So that’s the proof that it worked for me. Although I always drop 300/day, so that helps.
I don’t know how to replace the amount of traffic I get from EC if I leave them. I’ve withheld joining CMF because those ads are passive and I doubt I’ll recoup the visits with it that I have with EC.
Thought about BlogExplosion, but I can’t figure out their system. And I’ve seen Adgitize everywhere, but haven’t explored it yet.
Dunno. Somebody tell me what to do.
I would not have found all of the fun blogs I read without entrecard. I only drop like 50 a day and I read about 40 of them so it does take time. I can’t imagine 300. Not with building the yurt and taking care of the goats, making the jewelry, making the soap, canning the food, etc. And I like to read the blogs..the ones I don’t like I really don’t want to go back too…
Agreed on EC, that’s why I’m ‘dropping’ it.
Here are a few good non-EC blogs
http://barefootfoodie.com/
http://37paddington.blogspot.com/
http://evyan-r-osborne.blogspot.com/
I’ve established a new rule for myself. 2 hours and I’m done. Period. That means I pretty much just visit blogs I like, and pass up the dozens (hundreds) of SEO/make money ones. I’ve seen when they brag about how much they have made, and, to be honest, I’m not willing to spend 4 hours a day or more to make 46 dollars a month.
Way to go Jen. You join the growing list of those dropping (pun intended) EC for any number of reasons. Like you I was finding it too time consuming and when the funny business started that was it for me. Here’s to having a life and a better butt!
I’m still on the fence about EC. I was a habitual 300 a day dropper. When I took over Anastasia’s blog and started my new one I was dropping 300 a day on those too. I used Entrebar and it made it faster. When my daughter went in the hospital/PHP I got very inconsistent in my dropping. This was about the time the paid ads started. I noticed my stats remained relatively the same, so for about a week I just dropped whatever. I did lose my 2nd place standing in my category, but other than that, my ad price has remained up there, even though virtually NO ONE is buying ads on my sites with EC credits. (I know you bought for Kids Of Queers a couple of days ago and I thank you.)
Part of me thinks that people are not buying ads with EC credit and are hording their credits to cash out when the cash buy out begins. If you think we’ve had chaos now in EC, wait until they begin buying EC credits for cash.
I go back and forth with how much I concentrate on EC dropping. I only did 300/day once and decided that wasn’t really a great use of my time. I’m not trying to make money off my blog, so it’s more important to me to have a smaller group of actual readers, than a huge amount of “not really reading this” fly-by traffic.
The main reason I’m not leaving it is because the toolbar makes it easy to venture out and surf a bunch of new blogs. It’s always fun to find a new good one.
I also wanted to take the time to thank you for being one of the first people to comment on my blog and for shining a light on The Shark Tank when it was a baby newborn blog. As opposed to the toddler it is now.
I recommend http://heathercherry.blogspot.com. Really good, non-EC blog.
This EC thing is a pain in the butt. But I like the idea of listing new blogs for new reads.
Oddly enough.. Once I deleted my account.. I felt nothing! I don’t even have the urge to click “drop” anymore. It’s liberating
Mom’s cafe, I like the toolbar and may continue to use it except then I habitually drop. Even after I wrote this I went to sites that had a widget and could not stop my self from dropping. It’s really scary.
Kathy, EC has worked, it’s a great tool but now that I have met so many great blogs I want to venture forth. Still going to the blogs, like yours, that I love to read each day and comment on but at some point it becomes incestuous. CMF doesn’t do a whole lot for me, though I haven’t done much for it. I do like project wonderful as it costs pennies a day and I get quiet a bit of traffic from them. The problem is I don’t have the community like EC which is where or how I got to know blogs like yours and all the others that we frequent.
Pricilla, I wondered how you did all that. I wouldn’t have found all these great blogs either so I am really glad I found EC but if there were this many blogs that are wonderful on EC there must be a whole bunch that aren’t using EC and I want to find them. If I stay on EC I won’t have the time to look for other wonderful blogs.
Lilaphase, I can’t wait to look up those blogs. Thanks for the info and I’ll send an email about the blogroll. It’s on my list…
Old Man, $46/month! Wow. I’ve made $70 in just over a year. It’s pathetic. I actually like some of the Pinoy/Pinay blogs. I’m not sure why they just seem friendly for some reason. Not the money making ones but ones that are definitely trying to make money. Especially the ones that review American products, those are hoot.
Dufus, my butt is shrinking as I type this. Really I have been hauling rock all day for my driveway.
Lola, I haven’t horded my EC on purpose but I just haven’t bothered to place ads. It’s just one more thing to do and often I forget about it as I am dropping. I am looking forward to the mess when cash out time comes. I suspect it will not be much however. The other problem is that the price of many blogs has become too high. I can’t afford to put ads on the ones I want to. I can afford to place ads on the ones I don’t want to and I do like placing ads on the new (to EC) blogs to help get them going but I haven’t gotten a whole lot of traffic that way. Of course I might have been doing it wrong all this time.
Shawn, I like the toolbar too. I’ve asked my hacker son to come up with something similar that can be used and he is working on it. It is a very convenient tool to get to all the blogs I like, and a lot I don’t, I want to make something I can load a bunch of URLs in and then hit it so I can get to all of them. If I continue to use the EC toolbar I will be compelled to drop. I just can’t not do it.
Dani, I agree. Maybe make it a thing like wordless wednesday or something. Or mentor new blogs by giving them shout outs or something. I don’t know but I figure giving is a good way to get.
Dizz, I hope that happens to me. I think I just have to back away from it for a while. I’m not Catholic but I have lots of guilt for this kind of thing.
LOVE this post. Enjoyed your humor even though I am not familiar with Entrecard….
Liz aka Busy Lizzy at BC
I hate the new EC system too..
The paid ads are flooding my dashboard. I didn’t know there was a boycott going on.. I would have joined..lol!
I love nanny Goats in Panties. I try to check out the blog of anybody who comments
Female Science Professor is one of my favourites… oh, and Robert J. Sawyer’s blog…he’s one of the few authors that blog that I have found that seem to actually update their blogs regularly.
Hi Jen, I too am I an attractive red head with a blog. I am only 3 months into blogging after years of building websites on the side. I been doing google adsense and when i joined EC – I read that could affect your cash…Since i am close to the 100 buck payout zone i am waiting. but EC seems great to network – but then how do u make money through EC. Do you get private ads? still havnt figured that part out…and generally speaking – what’s a good number for a personal site (200 per day, 1000 etc)…u dont have to answer – just throwing it out there.
thanks and look forward to visiting those sites u listed.
I’ve been a long-time supporter of EC, but after being blind-sided by a snot-nosed kid (teenager they have for a moderator), I think I’m about done.
When the skirmish was all said and done, I lost my newest blog listing at EC, and 15000 credits and received 6 count em 6 spam warnings, all for sending a thank you note that included an invite to the membership site that accompanies the blog.
To me, that’s pure childish rubbish. I’ve got way more to do than worry about being nice to kids who aren’t dry behind the ears yet.
Can you tell I’m pretty irritated?
At any rate, I’ve been developing a site that will drive traffic for you and also provide you good, solid information about how to promote your blog (business). It’s free to join, you can earn a pro upgrade with less than 30 minutes activity per day.
Jen knows my blogs, she can direct you to one of them.
I thought it was just me, but I’ve put on a few pounds since I started EC too! And here I thought it was because I’m eating and drinking too much and not exercising enough!
I agree with you–tired of dropping. I don’t have huge crowds, but I do have fun and I have enjoyed finding good blogs along the way.
Here’s my fav blog not in the EC world:
Check out The Bloggess–
http://thebloggess.com/
I don’t know how anyone could have dropped 300 a day. I just never had time. I love all the new blogs I discovered, but I may pull the plug on EC soon and stick to finding new sites via other’s blogrolls… at least a “recommended site” is better than trolling thru hundreds just to find one good one.
Most of the Today.com blogs have given up on EC. I think I’m still new enough, that I really enjoy the dropping. Especially since I have the EC toolbar, it’s so fun! What’s wrong with me that the Thanks! or Go! Go! really make my day when I drop? But really, it does take a lot of time, and it bugs we when I can’t drop on everyone (like they’ll be mad at me!). Since I’ve started blogging, I have put on a few pounds, too…
I understand what you mean about the time being spent just catching up on drops, like you, I planned on making money off of my blogs too, but I just don’t want to waste my time dropping and then running, I’d rather use that time to write, I am looking for readers, not just droppers, although I am going to stick with Entrecard, I will only be dropping on blogs that I really read and comment on and blogs that drop and comment on mine as well..
I don’t think I know of blogs that are outside the EC circle.. 😛
I’ve been on EntreCard since May of last year. I’ve very often dropped 300 cards, sometimes, managing to do it every day for a month.
As people have noted, it is great for getting people to glance at your site but it is run by a bunch of kids that have no idea what they are doing.
When I have time, I drop 300 cards. I didn’t drop any during the strike, and when I’m too busy, I don’t worry about not dropping.
I do believe that the best way to build traffic to a site is to comment on other sites. I also strongly recommend using both Facebook and Twitter to promote your site.
The quick take on this: Set up a Twitter account. Use TwitterFeed to subscribe to your RSS feed and post links on Twitter. Use the Twitter Application in Facebook to get the copied to Facebook. Also, make sure have your Facebook notes subscribe to your blog, as well as join the networked blog application on Facebook.
BlogExplosion:
I’ve been on BlogExplosion since Oct 2004. It has been a long time. They are easy to use. Simply put, look at two sites, get a credit that gets used to have someone look at your site.
They can provide a nice way of dropping. Use BlogExplosion to randomly select which sites come up. Then, if any of them have an EntreCard, drop on it. That is how I first started using EntreCard
Adgitize:
I had been seeing Adgitize around for a while, but hadn’t jumped in. Someone left a comment on my blog encouraging me to, and I’m glad I did. So far, I’m about breaking even financially on Adgitize, though they’ve changed their approach and I expect to start making money next month. I think I first found Redhead Ranting via Adgitize. I strongly recommend Adgitize instead of EntreCard.
CMF Ads:
A lot of my old friends that I met via EntreCard moved to CMF Ads. It is a good network too. It doesn’t require dropping, so you get less traffic, but it is more interested traffic.
For sites outside the EC circle, I have a very long list. Having been blogging for many years, this tends to happen. I would have to sort through my lists to see which ones are currently active and worth recommending.
One final comment, if you are interested in making money off of blogging, you really should set your own domain.
All of this said, I’ll keep following this blog, and several others, even if they drop off of EntreCard.
One of my favorites is
http://www.cakewrecks.blogspot.com
I always get a laugh at the “wrecky” cakes there!
I’m grateful for finding you through Entrecard, lovely lady!! I will follow you whether you’re there or not. I already had to turn it off of my today.com site, due to those conflicts. Traffic wasn’t hugely affected, honestly. I never was the biggest dropper in the world. There were times I’d come by here and NOT even drop my card because I’d forget.
Hello.
I did EC strike too.
Good Easter Sunday,
Regards, Mizé.
I hate the dropping factor on Entrecards, I felt as though I could never keep up. When I had time I would do a few then do a few more later, and so on.
But I found so many great blogs there!! I will just have to make a list and keep following, because I think I am going to let it go.
BlogCatalog is a good site, but you have to do a lot of browsing. I will check out the other suggestions.
Some of my favorites that are not on Entrecard:
http://www.thegirlwhowearsmyshoes.com/
http://www.wheelchairkamikaze.com
http://indiancabbagesandkings.blogspot.com/
I Think that listing non-entrecard blogs sounds like a cool idea and with not spending so much time dropping it would be easier to find them too! 🙂
Stephanie @ http://fromhuskiestohusbands.today.com
I think all this nonsense going on is making a LOT of people questioning whether EC is worth it anymore. I know I am. I’ll continue to visit, widget or not though!
Dude…I dropped that shit like a bad boyfriend last week. It took too much time and ALWAYS crashed ma’ computer. I think your blog is strong enough to stand on it’s own;)
All the best!
WannaSmile
You make so many great points. And the comments are fabulous too. I
don’t know what to do about EC. I’ve found so many great sites through
EC but have taken a break from dropping cards and I don’t miss it.
Sometimes it felt like an obligation and hello, I already have a job.
Thanks for the mention. I’m glad I found you too.
What’s the problem:
Here’s 300 entrecards for you 🙂
http://blogion.ru/_html_/FreeEntreCard.php