Entrecard: Is it really doing your blog any good?

Entrecard.

It's the hype in the blogosphere these days. If you're a serious blogger then you should know about Entrecard.

Its a social networking media that encourages fellow bloggers to visit other blogs and to drop their "business cards" on your blog. During my first few days after I joined, Entrecard drove at least 30 visitors a day. I estimate that this is a very small number compared to other bloggers.

But do these numbers really reflect the quality of traffic I get from my site?

By entrecard's own system, it encourage bloggers to visit fellow bloggers site and then drop their cards in their blog's entrecard widget. This gives you EC credits where you can use to buy ads in the entrecard system. A few months after Entrecards' launch a site dedicated to entrecard network browsing is already in placed, see Createlf EntreCard.


However, how many bloggers are actually reading your blog? I myself admit that out of the 50 blogs I browsed in a day to drop my card, I only read and stay at about 5 blogs that interest me. To the rest of the other 45 blogs I am just another site statistic contributing to their bounce rate.

For those not familiar with what is bounce rate, here's a short note from wikipedia:

Bounce Rate (often confused with Exit Rate) is a term used in website traffic analysis. A Bounce occurs when a website visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a certain session timeout elapses. There is no standard minimum or maximum time limit a visitor must leave by in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software. A commonly used session timeout value is 30 minutes. In this case, if a visitor views a page and leaves his browser idle for 31 minutes, they will register as a "Bounce". If they then continue to navigate after this delay, a new session will occur and the last page they view before exiting or timing out again will result in another "Bounce". Thus, it is important to note the dependency between bounces and sessions.

With this is mind, I go back to my original question: Is it really doing your blog any good? I would have to answer yes! As a networking media its main goal is to drive traffic--to give your blog the opportunity to be seen (or read) by a lot of people. It's a known fact now that bloggers constantly hop and drop their cards across the network of entrecard users. I think it will always be that way. Now, for those bloggers to actually read your blog, it rest solely on the blog author--to create a good, inviting theme that will showcase good blog content. As the saying goes in the blogosphere, CONTENT IS KING!

As for entrecard, it has done its job. Now the rest is up to you.