Later Gator... you have chewed me up and spit me out!

The time has finally come to remove the Entrecard widget from Tulips Talking and make better use of the sidebar space it has occupied. Over the last couple of months some major bloggers have dropped Entrecard and some of my favorite places to advertise (that have brought me the most traffic) have left as well, but the last straw in helping me make that decision was the credits to advertise continued to drop as I disapproved all paid ads.

Another important issue with Entrecard, trying to locate blogs worthy of spending your hard earned credits to advertise on is a huge time waster mainly because 97% to 98% of the blogs in the Entrecard system are one small step above being spam blogs. And unfortunately the pricing system for advertising isn’t based on actual traffic a blog receives, it’s based on how many ads are waiting to be shown in the blog’s que. This sometimes creates hugely overpriced ads that bring little to no traffic.

The process of hunting down blogs in your niche, visiting them to see what they look like, weeding through blogs that have advert prices above 1000 credits, yet have less than 10 rss readers, getting less than quality traffic from your ads and then sticking with that process week, after week, after week is just too cumbersome. Where Entrecard fails in my opinion is that the adverts you place only last for 24 hours.

That just doesn’t work economically for me. If I’m going to spend 8 hours doing advertising for my blog, it should last longer than 10 days and bring better quality traffic. Entrecard is too much like those lame traffic exchange systems where you earn traffic credits for visiting other sites in the system you aren’t interested in just to get people who aren’t interested in your site to visit you. Sadly, Entrecard is not much different than that.

All Entrecards from my que have run, and today I removed the EC advert from this blog. See ya later Entrecard.