The Entrecarder

The Entrepoll this week is about what type of dropper you are, and by my own admission I am a Power dropper, with a hint of Reciprocative thrown in. One of the downsides to running multiple Entrecard accounts is that it's difficult to stay on top of all the card drops that run through 20 Inboxes. My current approach is to aggregate the various cards that have been dropped on my accounts and create folders that I use for all of the accounts. I'm not dropping from all 20 accounts every day and so I'm probably not going to win any Reciprocative Dropper awards. Honestly, the main reason I bother with working out of the Inbox isn't that I'm a friendly guy...it just improves the odds of return drops and the closer I can get to a 100% RDR, the more efficient I become.

I should probably include in each of my posts some disclaimer to the effect that "I am not an expert." There are few things that I do consider myself to be an expert on and yet it's easy to slip into that authoritative tone when writing, even when we know that we're not an expert. Sometimes just knowing more than your reader is qualification enough to justify the "expertise." However, even though I'll bet I'm as guilty as the next guy, it irks me when someone is passing themselves off as an expert when their advice is just garbage. A difference of opinion I can accept, but when you don't really have a clue, like when you have been part of the Entrecard community for 7 days and you are writing one of your obligatory "Entrecard is great and this is how to do it right" posts, please tone it down. 1500 ECs in your account doesn't make you the man, and you ain't no expert.

OK...now that that is off my chest, let me get back to card dropping strategies and the title of this post. It's true that Power dropping 300 cards from a list or from folders is very efficient. And it's also true that Reciprocative dropping will make you lots of friends here in the Entrecard community. But (inside joke for the Executive Apprentice) I'm thinking that Widget Surfing should be the Entrecard-sponsored card dropping strategy of choice. The reason is that it helps support the ad system better than the other card dropping strategies.

Power dropping means you're not caring whose ad is on that site's widget, just how quickly can you click and run. Reciprocative dropping is about who dropped on you and not who advertised on their widget. Neither of those two popular strategies are designed to benefit the 3rd party advertiser. Sure, you get an EC and the site gets an EC and the widget advertiser gets...a visit to their site? Not usually. They DO get their Entrecard seen (yeah!) and there is some benefit to that, but don't we really want visitors to our sites when we advertise and not just brand recognition?

Nimble fingers will still be able to widget surf their way to 300 sites in 30 minutes or less, managing to avoid reading "distracting" content along the way. However, if most folks were to widget surf instead of power drop or reciprocative drop then the ad system would have greater applicability. Spent 500 ECs on a Popular site? With widget surfing you should (on average) get 250 visitors to your site from that ad. It doesn't happen that way because Power dropping and Reciprocative dropping can drive the cost of the ad up without any direct relationship to the number of visitors your ad will generate.

So let's reward widget surfers with an extra bump. Give them a credit for hitting the "Drop Yours" and another one for clicking on the ad on the widget. (Since I am not a programmer, I am comfortable in the ignorance that believes that PhiRate can make it happen.) Of course, there will never be a "perfect" system that pleases everyone, but for now (and I recognize that I will likely have another idea tomorrow) I vote for subsidizing Widget Surfing.

Aloha.

NOTE: I am not an Entrecard expert.