Entrecard is giving away 5000 credits to anyone that writes a review of their service. They typically sell credits at $3 per thousand credits, so in theory this is worth $15. That said, I have never bought credits on Entrecard. Instead I earn them a couple different ways.

First, I have an Entrecard widget on my site. Other people pay credits to advertise. Entrecard keeps half of the credits paid and I get the other half. As one of the more busy sites on EntreCard ads on my site typically cost around one to three thousand credits a day. That gives me between 500 and 1500 credits each day for my advertising on Entrecard.

Entrecard members also get a credit for each site that they visit and drop a card on. You can get up to 300 credits this way. There are a few things that this results in.

First, the quality of Entrecard visits are not all that high. Google Analytics shows the bounce rate from Entrecard on my site is currently 92.77%. That’s pretty high. Normally, I don’t worry too much about bounce rate. It can mean that people are finding what they look for on their first page view. It can also mean that they are not really paying attention and simply moving on. I suspect this is often the case with Entrecard visitors. Yet even with that, I get over 100 visitors from Entrecard each month that stop and read more than one page on my site.

Many of these visitors end up being people that become regular readers and that I read regularly as well.

In terms of incoming demographics, a little less than half of my EntreCard traffic comes from the Americas. A little over a third comes from Asia. It often seems like it is a much higher percentage that comes from Asia. Drilling down more deeply, regions that drive the most traffic to my site from Entrecard are Manilla, Cebu and Jakarta. For U.S. traffic the regions driving the most traffic are from Texas and Florida.

There are some people from Connecticut that use Entrecard. I get more traffic from a local news site and from Facebook than I do from Entrecard, but I do get some Connecticut traffic.

Is Entrecard for you? Hard to tell. It can be a useful way of getting some new readers and joining some discussions. However, for it to be useful, you need to agree to have their widget on your website and really, you need to spend time connecting with your readers. On the other hand, you really should be spending time connecting with your readers anyway. So, do you use EntreCard? How’s it working for you?