Thanks for you efforts.

It’s hard to say if the EntreCard traffic led to the Adsense Smart Pricing or not although they happened at about the same time.

Based on my observations, I would not recommend putting EntreCard on a niche blog where you have Adsense.

However, I would recommend it for a blog where you wanted to generate social referral traffic and didn’t have Adsense or other PPC or PPM advertising. While 80-90% may be quick drive-by you will get some readers that you might not have gotten otherwise. If you’ve got good and relatively unique affiliate banners you’ll probably also see conversions on them that will surpass Adsense earnings that you typically get on a blogging or “make money” blog.

Otherwise, I still maintain that the quality of your results with Entrecard traffic is related to the quality of your understanding as a marketer… if you’re just a casual blogger with a diary type blog, then it’s going to be a little rougher than if one were a marketer who understand what people want and how to get it in front of them.

Thanks,
Sam

‘Selling’ things outside of the EntreCard space points to one of the fundamental flaws in the system, people aren’t buying ads and are only accumulating credits. People only want to buy ads on the big guy’s blogs and often act like they don’t want anyone but a big guy buying ad space on their site. As Vic explains in this article, Entrecard Another Loser, the market will become more inbred over time.

Vic or Griz can also tell you how to get 1500+ unique hits in a day, not a month.

I’ll also have to mention that Adsense simply won’t ever earn anything significant on a blog like Heavily Trafficked (or OpTempo for that matter). And, to make matters worse, using it on such a blog will probably kill your earnings on niche sites you may be running on the same account.

So now we can buy wordpress themes, text links, SEO ebooks, and other things with credits. Like they pointed out in their blog, that kills the argument about the quality of traffic, because although the quality may be low, each person dropping their card does earn you a credit that you can use to buy a wordpress theme, or a blog makeover, or other such things.

As for the traffic, I’ve seen about 1500 unique hits from Entrecard and about 40 comments, but I’ve been with them almost since the start. We can split hairs all we like, but 1500 hits for giving up a 125×125 space on my blog is a no brainer. Maybe once my blog gets to the point where I can actually generate significant revenue from Adsense, I’ll have to test it with and without Entrecard, but for now, to me, its pretty critical element for my strategy in building my blog.

EntreCard will bring the traffic in. Getting them to stick around and click something other than the EnterCard dropper is the tricky part.

So far, Entrecard sent me 51 visitors in less than a week. The difference between BR and EC is exponential! I like your analysis of EC staying factor… my visitors stay for like 7 secs, with a bounce rate of 98%.. one EC member left a comment, the rest dropped their cards. So I think you got it right, EC members tend to roam around and drop cards, some even buy ads.

Placement of such widgets is always controversial. They don’t pay the bills on the site but the makers of them always want you to give them top billing. For example, BlogRush was threatening to ban users who didn’t show their widget above the fold. EntreCard is hoping to use social pressure to get people to improve the placement.

Since my front page uses the magazine excerpt format it’s a pretty easy scroll down, past two big honkin’ ads, to get to the EntreCard widget and the other social networking widgets. But I have seen a few blogs that had 10 full posts on the front page and the widget in the footer.

I’ve wondered the same thing about people who have a large surplus of credits, if they’re waiting to use them on the big-shot blogs or not. Most disappointing so far is the number of Entrecard users who have their widget near or at the very bottom of their sidebar. I think they may be doing so to ensure people are scrolling some to check out their blog posts, but the further down the sidebar the widget is placed would cause me to not want to advertise with them (and may even determine my likelihood of allowing them to advertise on mine).