Monday, August 31, 2009

EntreCard: Is there a positive side of the 1 EC/drop policy change?

Many members in EntreCard complain at the moment about the new policy which give only the active droppers 1 credit (EC). The person who receives the drop will get 0 credit from 1st September on.


In the previous part of "Good bye, cheap ads! Consequences of the policy change" i pointed out that the advertising price for the low cost ads (below 128 EC) will increase as there are just as a maximum 300 EC (+25% of your previous EC ad price) left after the day is over.
Most of the member don't even drop 300 cards, so their Ad price will be around the 16 to 256 EC-Level which gives them just 4 to 64 ECs at the end of the day as an extra.

What shall be now the positive side with the reduction in credits?

It will be for sure that the actual high advertising prices from the TOP 30 Blogs will reach levels around 1.024 EC and lower instead of the previous 4.096 EC/8.196 EC.
When we look at the TOP 30 members and their earnings, they will be reduced by over 550 to 1.000 ECs per day. ECs which can't flow back anymore in the economy.

They have to buy ads with lower EC costs (see post: Good bye, cheap ads!) or less of the high priced ads. In return the ad prices of more members in the high priced area (above 1.024 EC)will drop! It may take a few days or weeks but then you will see much lower ad prices for these member!

Which type of clicking method will benefit from this policy change?

Now it's still useful to reciprocate the drops which you get as the person who dropped on you gave you 1 EC into your account. From 1st September on, this might change as you get only credits for your drops.
In case you don't care about popularity points and an adequate ad price, you can start chain-clicking. This means you start with one blog and click on the available ad on this blog and then so on and on. With this method you learn some new blogs and perhaps you will find new favorites for the future!

But i think another trend will come up now: You can choose your favorite blogs and start reading them, as you don't receive anymore ECs for persons who come to you from your ad campaigns. Reciprocate the drops from your inbox as they brought you traffic, find your favorites and visit them regularly. In the end you can build more loyal readers and friendship with this method. Wait some days and advertise with two popular blogs. In this case you get immediately around 30 to 50 drops. Try to hold them by dropping cards daily on these new "acquired" members.
With this method you and your blog will grow and your amount of followers gets week by week more!

But wait! Is there not another method which already more than 300 members are using to give their visitors more than just 1 EC?


Yes, there is a method which will give you additional traffic and attract more new and old members to visit your blog. It costs you just a few minutes to set it up in your Blogger-Layout-Editor.

Use the TOP Dropper-Method!

Give the persons who visit you the most often throughout the month a place in your sidebar. You don't have to copy and paste it every month from the Statistic web page. Just put the TOP Dropper-RSS-Feed in your sidebar and everyone sees the actual TOP Droppers from your blog. You can see this on all of our four blogs!

Other members publish each month a list of their TOP Droppers with their clicks throughout the past month, some publish additional the pictures of them. This is up to you how you want to give your "loyal" visitors a gift.

This gift is so precious and can help them to gain a better PageRank (in SEO-Language it's called one-way backlink) that's why some members keep on dropping daily (even you never dropped on them) to get on these lists and to remain on these TOP positions they have to drop everyday.


In my opinion the combination of all three would be a good mix and would keep the EntreCard system going in the right direction.

  • Give the persons a click on their ads when you feel this could be an attractive ad or just because it's the blog of your friend.
  • Learn to love new blogs who dropped in your Inbox, take your time for some comments on your favorite blogs.
  • Give your visitors some link love for their daily visits to your blog by "installing" the TOP Dropper-RSS--Feed in your sidebar and attract new visitors.
  • Think positive about the change because everyone gets less ECs from now on, we are all in the same boat!
  • The advertising prices on the TOP 30 Blogs will go down in a few days/weeks. But there should be an entire new price system for the advertisement together with the actual change! You can read some good proposals on Eli's Blog An economist’s bold proposal to combat entrecard-inflation and attain stable economy
1st pic from beatkueng

5 comments:

  1. "This gift is so precious and can help them to gain a better PageRank (in SEO-Language it's called one-way backlink)"

    While partially correct, it's important to note that this is only true if the blog whose TD list you are on is of a higher PR than you are. Being listed on a TD list of lower rank will not affect a positive change of the PR of your blog.

    See here for a further explanation or if you don't believe me (due to our previous altercation), Google "PageRank" and you'll see where I get my information from.

    I hope this finds you well

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hello Michael,

    like with many things in life it is all depending.

    If it would be always like this that you get penalized, i would have seen these blogs who are on almost all TOP Dropper lists with a drop in their page rank.

    But NO, most of them rank at PR 3 or 4, while most of the TOP Dropper blogs have a PR between 0 and 2.

    It depends, if Google sees the link as some sort of "exchange" or if they doom it as a link farm (which will be penalized).
    Then it depends, how fast you gained so many links in a certain period of time. Otherwise Google might smell perhaps that this could be bought links with no value.

    One more one-way back link to your blog is always better than no back link at all and has a higher value than the link exchange.

    On the other hand it can be used for SERP as you can put your Keywords in the Anchor Text and brand your webpage for a better ranking for these key words in the Search engines.

    Another example would be Facebook or twitter - both with Pagerank 9.

    Why?

    Because everyone links to twitter/Facebook and/or your own profile there.

    I think the majority of links will come from blogs which don't have such a PR.
    In this case (from your explanation) Facebook and Twitter could never reach such a high PR and would be stuck at an average PR of all combined backlinks?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have been with Entrecard for quite some time, and I had no idea I got credit when someone clicked on my ad, as well as when I clicked on theirs. This change does not effect my thinking, because I never thought it was any different. It really doesn't make much sense from a business stand point, to do it the old way.

    ReplyDelete
  4. How great this was! I loved the adding the rss feed vs copy and paste everytime! Thanks♥

    ReplyDelete
  5. Corny,

    You do understand what the word "experiment" means, yes?

    I just did what the site said to do, knowing full well how Google determines PageRank.

    That doesn't mean my post on PageRank was wrong.

    Nevertheless, an expert is a claim you'll not ever hear from me.

    My readers appreciate that about me.

    I hope this finds you well.

    ReplyDelete

Blog Widget by LinkWithin