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A while ago i was writing a post about Blogrush and Entrecard. This was a few days after i discovered EC. It worked nice (so i thought). However, in time, my opinion has changed.

ENTRECARD IS THE SAME CRAP FREE ADVERTISING CAN OFFER.

But what else should you expect from free stuff. For people who don’t know what Blogrush is I will tell you immediately. Blogrush is a program that will send readers to your site (or so says it’s admin) for free. The only thing you have to do is place a widget on your site that displays links from other sites. This is something like link exchange without the backlinks. At first glance this could work, but it doesn’t. You place the thingy on your site and wait. And wait, and wait. Your latest post is displayed 5000 times but still no one click on it. So it’s goodbye free traffic. The reason why this system doesn’t work is because your posts get displayed but no one sees them. This is because everyone can (and will) place the widget on a almost invisible position. Nobody wants to use their good space (used for advertising) for some crazy widget. This was the almost invisible position, because you can use the absolutely invisible position. You can place the widget in an iFrame and set the iFrame’s dimension to 0×0 pixels. The Blogrush spider will find the html on your site but no one will see it. Great. So in my opinion Blogrush is doomed. It will fail.

As for Entrecard… It also sucks. When i found EC I was excited it worked. It sent visitors to my site. And that’s just about it (you should keep in mind the fact that autosurf programs also give you free visits). The thing is EC sent visitors to my site, but not readers. 95% of the visits EC sent me just bounced off after dropping their card. Dropping what card I hear you ask? Entrecard’s system is based on a liason between webmasters. Webmasters get in touch with each other by dropping their card (something like a business card). This way you get credits to your account and you can display your ad on other sites in the network. Besides getting credits from dropping your card, you can also get credits from people (webmasters) who drop their cards on your site. Anyway, most of the people over there get their credits by dropping their cards on other sites. And this is more and more like autosurf.

So to continue my story… I a couple of weeks I had the amount of credits needed to display my ad on a popular site like Problogger or JohnChow. Getting on a site like this means huuuge exposure. But the problem is big sites never have free ad space. You’ll have to wait 12-14 days. Patience is a virtue and I have it. So i have waited 14 days for a free spot on Problogger. The wait time was 1 hour. I was getting anxious. My site was going to be on Problogger. Great. But the only problem I had was that the waiting time remained at 1 hour for the whole day (23 hours to be precise). And after that all the ad spots were again full for 14 days. So I guess there’s something going on in here. I think you must know the right people to get featured on a famous site.

So the conclusion is that Entrecard is nothing but an autosurf program that gets you visitors not readers, and only if you people in high places you can use it at full capacity.

So the final conclusion is: all the free advertising methods tested by me so far (Blogrush, Entrecard, Adgridwork) don’t work any better than any autosurf system.

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I found Entrecard on one of my favorite sites, JohnCow.com. I was always seeing that ECard thing on his site but i didn’t know what that was (and really never was interested). John published today an article called The last drop for Entrecard in which he says:

“The whole purpose behind EC is to get noticed in the blogosphere because your 125×125 ad gets displayed on other blogs that have signed up with EC. Obviously if your card is featured on a huge blog like Problogger (who gets sponsored by EC) or JohnChow, you’re bound get get a nice bump in traffic for those 24 hours. Currently the cost for these two blogs is 330 and 260.“

So Entrecard is like having your ad displayed on a big site for free (almost, it costs you credit, not real money). I have just signed up for Entrecard and placed their widget on my site and in 2 hours i got some 20+ visitors. Now this happened because of 2 things:

1) Entrecard really works and

2) As John says, “The EC powerusers are so keen on getting becoming popular within the ranks of the community, that they are working hard in chain dropping their cards on all EC blogs each day, just to accumulate more credits and inflating their own advertising prices. Emails keep getting send around, asking for drops, recommendations and whatever else it is that will get you popular on the categories pages.”

So basically what happens here is the more (entrecard)users click on your widget to drop you a card the more credit you will need to display an ad on their site. So the more they click the higher their rating and the more you’ll have to pay.

The problem with this system is that a site is rated based on the number of cards it drops and not based on some real stats. Soo… the cost for having your ad displayed on JohnChow.com or Problogger.net is 260 and 330 credits. And for your ad to show up on a blog that has 21 subscribers is…… 400 credits.

So this is what’s wrong with Entrecard. But unlike John i think that should not present a big problem. Let them drop all the cards they want, let them artificially inflate their prices, let all the stupid advertisers pay lots of credits to get featured on a 10 visitors/day site. All you need to get some good advertising with Entrecard is to check the real stats of the site you are advertising on.

Now for Blogrush… i’m gonna tell you the truth. It doesn’t work. Blogrush works almost the same way as Entrecard. Sites in the network display your post and you display theirs. Again for free. I have been testing Blogrush for about 4 months on 3 sites. I even used it on this site. What are the stats i hear you ask? Disastrous. A post was displayed some 15,000+ times and only 2 users were sent to my site (unlike Entrecard who sent 20+ visitors to my site in about 2 hours). And it was a good post that was displayed by Blogrush (it got me some 10,000+ visitors in 2 days.
Now the thing is:

a) Entrecard - i have used it for about 3 hours now and i don’t know the kind of traffic it can bring (targeted or not). But it works. It brings traffic.

b) Blogrush - doesn’t work because…(i think i know why but i will have to look deeper into this matter) but it brings targeted traffic.

The decision is all yours. I will post more info on this in a few days. Over and out.

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