Ok, this seems to be the next craze in driving traffic to your blog. This may not be a very new system, but it is new to me, and is a growing trend on many of the blogs that I have been reading. Entrecard is advertised as being like business cards for your blog. The idea is that you put the widget on your blog, like the one I have over to the right hand side of this blog, and then visit the network of users. You can certainly spend a lot of time clicking on links and checking out new blogs. The question is, how effective is this?

Personally, I have seen a good bit of traffic come to blogs that I have added to the network. However, the problem seems to be that the people are really only coming to get credit for clicking on the links, and do not spend any time reading the posts. This obviously does not provide more subscribers or regular readers. It will be interesting to see how this traffic is handled by ranking sites, such as Google. Will they view it as “paid” traffic, or regular traffic? I guess we will just have to wait and see.

The upside is, if the traffic ends up being beneficial for you, you can add your advertisement to several other blogs by purchasing space on their widget. The good news is that it will not cost you any money. Simply spend your “credits”, which you earn by surfing the network. You can also “sell” your space, thus earning more credits. With the growing popularity of the system, there are also many contests that pop up, giving away credits as prizes. So, this is another way to stockpile your credits, and buy more advertising. Blog contests also draw a lot of attention, so offering this prize could also be beneficial in your marketing campaigns.

This system can certainly get your blog out there, but it is not nearly as targeted as some of the other blog networks can be. This is easy to set up, and easy to run, so it is worth the time to set up an account. If you read through the blogs you come to, you will find a ton of good material, and a lot of stuff that is just down right interesting!

So, now to try and prove my assumption wrong (that no one really reads the blogs they find via Entrecards) make sure that you leave a comment below to let me know you do read the posts!