Yesterday, I read a great blog post about a daughter and her mother as they were leaving a hospital. Whether or not you’re interested in the relationship between good content and advertising, you should go out and read that article.

I stumbled across it as I was reading various blogs I found with EntreCard. EntreCard, like many other emerging sites ends up having a lot of people currently writing blog posts about their thoughts and experiences with it, as well as how they use it. One popular discussion is how people find sites on EntreCard. Do they follow the advertisements? As a person that both advertises using EntreCard and has others advertise on my site using EntreCard, I would encourage everyone, especially EntreCard users to follow the advertising links.

If you use EntreCard, you can drop your card on people’s websites. It goes into their inbox and gives them advertising credits. So, if you use EntreCard, be sure to drop a card. When a card is dropped on you, you may want to visit the site of the person dropping a card on you, read their content, drop a card on them, and follow the link to sites advertised on their site.

You may also want to check out the most popular sites on EntreCard and visit them. I try to do a combination of all of this. With that, I can easily find 300 sites to drop my card on each day, which is the limit that EntreCard imposes. Others seem to like websites that list EntreCard users where you can very quickly drop your cards. I’m not a big fan of this. I want to build my readership and find great blog entries like the one that I mentioned above.

I also believe that if you are more involved with the blogs you visit, not only are you more likely to build readers, but they are more likely to drop their cards on you. I find that about 55% of the sites I visit drop cards on me in return. I’ve had people from EntreCard add me as friends on MyBlogLog, Blogcatalog and place advertisements on my site.

The advertising rate varies based on the number of people queued up to advertise on your site, and my ad rates are typically around 512 EntreCard credits. Depending on the trading of EntreCard credits, that works out to be a couple dollars per advertisement, which seems reasonable.

However, I do not trade in my EntreCard credits. Instead, I use them to buy advertisements on other sites. Typically, I search the most popular sites that have a low advertising rate. I don’t know how EntreCard calculates popularity, but I like to look for sites where the popularity is some multiple of the advertising price. I been buying a fair amount of ads this way, but I have analyzed their effectiveness yet.

There are other things that I look for when buying EntreCard ads. Is the EntreCard ad near the top of the page? If the ad is hard to find, then it is worth less. It is worth the most if it is in a prominent position, but even ads below the fold are valuable, especially if the site has good content that gets people to scroll down. I look at the date of the most recent post. Sites with daily posts are most likely to get good traffic. If the post is more than a week or so old, the traffic is likely to be much less, and much less interesting. I also have added various plugins to Firefox that shows Alexa ratings, Compete Ratings, page ranks, and so on. All of this adds into the calculation.

Yet most of this is driven by the most important factor, the quality of the content. Fresh compelling content will drive up rankings, popularity and traffic. So, if you find a good website, like the one that I mentioned above, it may well be worth it to through all the calculations to the wind and place an ad on site with a great blog post.