The Entrecarder

Recently I had the opportunity to guest drop for another Entrecarder for 7 days, in addition to my regular multiple account activities. This particular Entrecarder buys ads in addition to dropping cards and has achieved good results in the form of a high ranking in their category and in the community at large. Instead of Power Dropping my way through 300 cards a day, as I might do on my own accounts, I used multiple card dropping strategies to ensure that this Entrecarder got plenty of traffic.

I've mentioned before that I'm not a fan of blindly return dropping from the Drops Inbox. It might be polite to do so, but if one is seeking to get ranked above their peers, being nice doesn't necessarily cut it. The trick is to figure out how often to return drop from one's Drop Inbox and on which cards. Power Droppers do not need a return drop and Widget Surfers are not keeping track of who they dropped on and as such won't know if you returned the drop. Reciprocative Droppers do need a return drop if they are really playing the game, and part of my daily strategy included hitting both the major Recipro groups. In the end, Alexa showed a significant spike in traffic for the week I was at the helm. So, do I pat myself on the back? Nope. The truth is that it was that Entrecarder's ads and other activities that caused the majority of the spike and not my wonderful card dropping wizardry. Oh, the wizardry is important, but mostly when one opts to not advertise.

I learned that I wasn't interested in working with another Entrecarder's existing account, primarily because of the need to perform and the lack of revenue, or in other words, I had to work too hard for the return. So, I decided to try guest card dropping for an internet acquaintance who had not yet signed up for their own Entrecard account. Their blog had virtually no traffic and an Alexa ranking of 7,595,407, sporting just 10 entries since being started at the beginning of the year. Today marks the end of a week of card dropping activity and the Alexa 1 week average is 251,587. I placed a few ads on other new Entrecard accounts, but didn't spend more than 10 ECs in all. Again, it really wasn't all that fun and I did it mostly as an experiment. It took me about an hour a day and the bottom line is that while the traffic rank increase was significant, no one is going to pay me enough money to drop cards for them on a regular basis.

My third experiment consisted of making a concentrated effort to drop on new Entrecard accounts. This blog focuses on the Entrecard community and as such it should have a certain appeal to newer members as they go up the learning curve. I was interested in finding out how many new Entrecarders would return card drops versus more seasoned Entrecarders. I didn't keep stats as much as obtain a gut feel and my gut tells me that working with the noobs is a good choice. For a week or so I copied the link info from my Drops Inbox into an Excel spreadsheet and tried to determine which of the newer Entrecarders were return dropping on a regular basis. Not all that many as it turned out. Regardless, I believe there is significant value to dropping on the newest members of our community. Doing so says "Welcome" and gives these new Entrecarders a chance to visit your site from the get-go. Interestingly, I did notice an increase in RSS subscribers in the past week, which might be a result of the concentrated card dropping on new Entrecard accounts.

So, it's thumbs down on guest dropping (unless the Credit Exchange results in a historic high for the value of ECs) and a thumb's up for pointedly dropping on new Entrecarders.