Matt’s Musings

I’ve been a very passive, if not disinterested Entercard observer for the past several months, not particularly interested in participating in what might be either a huge advertising coup or an even bigger time waster. Right now, I’m hoping that it is the former, but I fear that it is probably closer to the latter.

Entrecard is, in case you haven’t kept up with it, a way for people to advertise on various blogs by dropping their business cards in on that site. If accepted by the blog’s owner, then your card can get one full day of free advertising. Not bad if you manage to get featured on an A-Lister’s blog, but probably not too much help if you are on someone’s anonymous Blogspot blog.

The biggest reason many people are using Entrecard is to lower their Alexa score. A lower Alexa number tells advertisers that your blog rocks and that you have a site worth advertising on. Admittedly, that is the primary reason why I added Alexa to several of my blogs — to give me an advantage traffic-wise.

I’m not interested in fooling my advertisers, rather I want to thwart Entrecard from pushing my Alexa numbers down further.

You see, when Entrecard began my Alexa score for my flagship blog was about 75,000 — a strong number for any site. Since Entrecard came along my numbers have been dropping steadily to 157,000. This drop isn’t borne out in reduced traffic numbers as my Google Analytics statistics shows that The Article Writer is still growing. Thus, in order to regain my rightful place online, I need to work the system too. Not my way of doing business, but I feel pressured somewhat to respond.

For the record, I’m simply testing this traffic generating system and have made no plans to keep it in place long term. Likely, I’ll remove the cards from a few blogs and keep it on some others, just to remain competitive.

Alexa isn’t a particularly accurate traffic measurement tool, but as far as advertisers go it is one method they use to determine a site’s worth.

Filed under: Vendo