There are many blogs out there, and many reasons that people write blogs. Some blogs are personal, some are news, some are commentary, and so on. There are many different reasons that people try to bring traffic to their blogs. It might be to earn money from advertising, to get more people exposed to ones viewpoints, or perhaps just another way to compete. The ways that people try to get traffic is also manifold and frequently changing.

EntreCard is one of the most notorious sites. It can drive a lot of traffic, but people question the quality of the traffic and even more significantly the ability of their management to run the site effectively.

The idea of EntreCard is rather simple and compelling. People place a 125x125 pixel widget on their site. If you are a member of EntreCard and you visit another site with EntreCard you can drop a card on the blog, letting the owner know that you’ve visited. In addition, you get a credit for dropping a card. You used to get a credit when people dropped a card on you as well, but a recent, ill-thought out changes ended that. These credits can be used to buy advertisements to show up in the 125x125 pixel widget. You receive credits for advertisements placed on your widget after EntreCard takes a very steep cut.

A while ago, EntreCard announced they would introduce paid advertisements into the mix, and people complained and left. They backed off, but have now introduced the idea again. After great complaining, and more people leaving, they announced that for an annual fee of $50 per blog, users could opt out of paid advertisements. This only fueled the objections and many more people have left.

I can understand their desire to place ads on EntreCard users’ blogs. They need to monetize their efforts somehow. However, they have severely mismanaged the whole process. They have not sought to include their users in the process and find out what would be most acceptable. In doing so they have alienated their users.

Many people have written about this latest fiasco, including Cornyman, Business Sphere, Alerity Art, and The Suss. I’ve added a lot of comments at a lot of different places and I’ll summarize some of them here.

One comment is that EntreCard seems to be violating its own Terms and Conditions with their latest foray into paid advertising. There T&C says, "It is your sole responsibility to examine sites wishing to run their card on your widget, and decide for yourself whether you want to link to their site through the widget." Unfortunately, the new policy currently makes that impossible.

Another key comment is that there are other ways to thwart the paid advertising. No one wants to advertise if it hurts their brand. With the outrage about the paid advertising, people are ill-advised to place paid ads with EntreCard. There is a glut of impressions on the ad market as it is and advertisers have lots of choices where to place ads. A paid ad on EntreCard is a bad decision in the current environment. It could be further compounded by negative posts about advertisers. As an illustration, remember my link to EntreCard at the top of my post? Follow the link. That is not the way you want people linking to your brand, but the sort of links that undesired paid advertisers could face on EntreCard.

With that, let me talk a little bit about the survey I have set up. I left comments around the blogs encouraging people to fill out the survey and promised I would share data as things progressed. Let me share a few observations and insights.

CMF Ads is the most popular site so far of survey respondents. 80% of the respondents use CMF Ads. In addition, they have high customer loyalty, with none of their users leaving CMF Ads. CMF Ads allows great control over which ads show up on your site. It is fairly straight forward to use. It does not incentivize people to visit the ads, and doesn’t provide details about who visits whom. As such, while it is very popular, it does not drive as much traffic as other sites.

Adgitize was part of the group of sites that came in with over 50% utilization. They have about 10% that have left Adgitize. They do not currently allow users to control which ads show up on the website, but they do reward users for the number of ads displayed. They also incentivize people to visit the ads. Currently, I get more traffic from Adgitize than I do from any other ads.

EntreCard gets the lowest rating, with over a third of the respondents reporting having left EntreCard. The next highest in user dissatisfaction is Project Wonderful. Less than 40% of respondents report using it, and over 15% report leaving.

In terms of sites that allow you to see who has recently visited your site, in addition to EntreCard there is MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. MyBlogLog was the first to market in this area and was bought out by Yahoo!. However, they seem to have lost their luster and are just ahead of Project Wonderful. On the other hand BlogCatalog has one of the highest respondent satisfaction ratings.

There is a lot of additional data that I hope to glean from this and I am using this to modify my strategies to engage more readers in my blog. So, if you haven’t do so already, please fill out my survey so I can have more complete data and let me know your thoughts about how to best promote blogs.