The other day I signed up for Entrecard which is, for lack of a better description, a banner exchange program. I’m sure a lot of people have done a much better job explaining how Entrecard works than I could do but here’s a brief rundown. The site runs on a credit-based system (don’t let visions of BlogRush flood your mind, this is at least functional) in which actions by users result in credits you can spend to get your small banner/button displayed on another user’s site. For some reason, Entrecard insists on using the terminology “card” instead of banner. There are three ways to earn credits: “drop your card” at a member’s site, have a member “drop their card” at your site or sell an ad to another member so their card is displayed in your widget. If that doesn’t make sense, there’s a pretty good video on the front of the Entrecard site and a blog post there that might clear things up for you.

Things I Don’t Like

• The site is, especially for new users, a pretty spammy affair. The instant you sign up and begin displaying the widget you get inundated with advertiser requests trying to take advantage of the low credit cost to advertise on your site. My best advice for new users is to reject all advertiser requests for the first day or two until your price reaches a reasonable level. Keep in mind that your price rises and falls based on how many people drop their cards at your site.
• Most of the cards people have created are absolutely white hot awful. My card for this site (shown on the right) isn’t a work of art by any means but it’s still of a higher quality than most. Someone should start a service designing cards for people in exchange for a small fee or Entrecard Credits. I turned down dozens of advertiser requests because the card they wanted to display was so terrible.
• The traffic is pretty shallow. I’ll spare you the numbers but most of the people coming to this site via Entrecard are hit-and-run visitors here only to drop their card and leave. Considering this is a banner exchange program no one should find that surprising.

Things I Do Like

• Entrecard is more or less a fun little game and diversion. If you go into it with that frame of mind it’s hard to be too critical of it. There’s a sense of community around the site in which struggling websites are trying to help each other gain exposure.
• The traffic may be shallow but at least it exists. The big problem with BlogRush was that you saw absolutely no return on your investment. I received more traffic from Entrecard in the first hour than I saw from BlogRush in an entire day. The hope is that, even though people are most likely just visiting to drop a card and leave, eventually repeat visits may prompt them to stick around and actually check out your site.
• It’s viable free advertising. With enough earned credits you can at least get a small piece of the pie on much larger sites than your own for an entire day. The position of your card will most likely not be optimal or in high traffic areas but it won’t cost you anything but some time.
• Finally, some of the sites I’ve found via Entrecard have actually been pretty interesting. Of course, the Internet Marketing crowd has flooded the system already but even some of those sites aren’t too shabby. My own personal policy for as long as I run the widget is to only accept advertising offers from sites I actually think people will enjoy or find useful.

Final Thoughts

This post became much longer than I originally imagined so thanks for sticking it out until the end. I’m going to leave the widget up for awhile until at least my own advertising campaigns on other sites expire. Dropping cards, approving/rejecting advertisers and browsing sites has been a nice little distraction for the last two days. I’m afraid it’s all going to become a bit too overwhelming in the end though. I’m taking a wait and see approach and keeping modestly low expectations with Entrecard for now.