Well, the turmoil over EntreCard’s latest changes seem to be subsiding and I thought it would be a good idea to think about what happened and what we can learn from it.

Initially, there was a lot of outrage, especially by people concerned about advertisers who had bought ads under one assumption, only to have that assumption change out from underneath them. This has resulted in a few different changes in behavior.

First, several website are now advertising themselves as being free of paid EntreCard ads. On top of that, people have taken the strategy of not clicking on ads that have ‘type=paid’ on the end of the URL. Meanwhile, EntreCard has raised prices for paid advertisers started to look at ways to use some of the proceeds to buy back EntreCard Credits.

At least this time, they are trying to get some input on how best to do this. The discussion has had some ill thought out comments about people Asian people trying game the system, and apparently using this as an excuse for not letting market forces determine the appropriate value. We shall see what EntreCard ends up deciding to do.

With that, let’s look at what we can learn from the introduction of the paid ads. EntreCard had been talking about this for a while, and it would seem as if they could have managed the process a little better.

First, they should have determined what an appropriate level of paid ads would have been. I’ve often thought that paid advertising would be a good thing for EntreCard. However, making 50% of the ads paid seems excessive. I’ve always suggested that 20% would be a better level.

Beyond that, they should have had an announcement with appropriate lead times. For example, I have ads queued up for two weeks. People who bought ads during the two weeks before the paid ads went into affect are the ones that were most affected. If EntreCard had let people know a month ahead of time when the change would go into effect and the details of the program, advertisers could have adjusted their strategy.

That said, it appears as if people have adjusted their strategies. I’ve always suggested that when buying ads, you should buy ads that cost no more than one fifth of the sites popularity. This was based on the idea that popularity is the total number of cards dropped over a five-day period. So, one fifth of the popularity is the number of cards dropped on a site on a day, and is a good proxy for the number of card droppers that will see the ad.

With the change in advertising policy, you should really only advertise on sites where the price is one tenth of the popularity. Over the past week, I’ve seen the ad rates shifting in this direction. Essentially, EntreCard has devalued advertisements by 50% and people are adjusting.

People have been adjusting in other ways as well. Red Head Ranting is one of the many blogs that have written about their reaction. Last week, I wrote a fairly long comment on one of the posts there where I went into details of how I’ve responded and looked at other sites. I’m including this here for anyone that didn’t see it on the Red Head Ranting blog.

I've been on EntreCard since May of last year. I've very often dropped 300 cards, sometimes, managing to do it every day for a month.

As people have noted, it is great for getting people to glance at your site but it is run by a bunch of kids that have no idea what they are doing.

When I have time, I drop 300 cards. I didn't drop any during the strike, and when I'm too busy, I don't worry about not dropping.

I do believe that the best way to build traffic to a site is to comment on other sites. I also strongly recommend using both Facebook and Twitter to promote your site.

The quick take on this: Set up a Twitter account. Use TwitterFeed to subscribe to your RSS feed and post links on Twitter. Use the Twitter Application in Facebook to get the copied to Facebook. Also, make sure have your Facebook notes subscribe to your blog, as well as join the networked blog application on Facebook.

BlogExplosion:

I've been on BlogExplosion since Oct 2004. It has been a long time. They are easy to use. Simply put, look at two sites, get a credit that gets used to have someone look at your site.

They can provide a nice way of dropping. Use BlogExplosion to randomly select which sites come up. Then, if any of them have an EntreCard, drop on it. That is how I first started using EntreCard

Adgitize:

I had been seeing Adgitize around for a while, but hadn't jumped in. Someone left a comment on my blog encouraging me to, and I'm glad I did. So far, I'm about breaking even financially on Adgitize, though they've changed their approach and I expect to start making money next month. I think I first found Redhead Ranting via Adgitize. I strongly recommend Adgitize instead of EntreCard.

CMF Ads:

A lot of my old friends that I met via EntreCard moved to CMF Ads. It is a good network too. It doesn't require dropping, so you get less traffic, but it is more interested traffic.

For sites outside the EC circle, I have a very long list. Having been blogging for many years, this tends to happen. I would have to sort through my lists to see which ones are currently active and worth recommending.

One final comment, if you are interested in making money off of blogging, you really should set your own domain.

All of this said, I'll keep following this blog, and several others, even if they drop off of EntreCard.