The Entrecarder

It didn't work. Well, at least not as of yet. Phirate was right when he said that my plan to accept ads across all 20 Entrecard accounts at the same time would be labor intensive and likely not worth the effort. There are a couple of other reasons why I pulled the plug--temporarily--on that idea. First of all, I chose the witching hour of midnight Eastern Time to make the switch. Bad, bad idea. It made sense from the standpoint of having a "new" day to run all the ads in, but that is not a good time of day to try and do anything on the Entrecard system. SLOW.

Speed is important because I had to log into 20 different accounts and reject the ads so that my advertiser would get their credits back. If I missed the 24 hour cutoff then they would end up paying for the ad twice, one via the Entrecard system and once to me directly.

Another potential downside to the "advertise across all 20 Biz Beacon Advertising Co-op sites" plan was that I was having to reject lots of potential ads in order to keep the space available. Some folks were not happy and expressed their discontent in the Entrecard Forum. Negative publicity.

I was charging 500-600 ECs for the opportunity of advertising on Entrecard widgets that carried a system price of 800-1000 (1200 as of this writing) ECs. Good deal for the advertiser and good deal for me. So, I'm not going to say that I won't try it again. Honestly, I'm surprised that the sites on the Popular page don't use this approach. If my site had a price tag of 400 ECs a day and the system kept 300 of that, it might be worth 5 minutes a day to use my approach and pocket the potential $3 that I was missing. That's $90 a month extra if I could sell the ECs at current market value of $10 per 1000. And many of those Popular sites have no problem with someone ponying up to spend 400 ECs a day to place their Entrecard there. Just a thought. (How many ECs would you pay to get on Problogger or Chow?)

The other part of the Biz Beacon Advertising Co-op is scheduled to start tomorrow. I've placed a 125x125 ad under the Entrecard widget on each of my 20 sites and have now sold that space for 700 ECs a week, or 5 ECs a day per site. This is obviously way below the system price for space on 20 Entrecard widgets, but it should be as one doesn't get credit for a drop or experience some of the other benefits of advertising on an Entrecard widget. I feel it is a better deal than Project Wonderful in that you can count on having the space for the week and don't have to worry about being outbid. I will likely adjust the price of this program based on demand and the total system cost of my Entrecards.