I’ve been using EntreCard for quite a while now (I’m user 385) and one of the first things I started to see in the EntreCard community was a lot of people with sub par quality blogs or really low RSS counts slowly rising to the top of their respective categories. This is obviously because of the fact that your advertising rate will also go up based not only on how many cards are dropped on your blog or ads that are purchased on your blog, but also because of how many cards you drop on other blogs. I don’t agree with this system and it’s actually something that John Cow had mentioned on his blog recently where he makes a lot of good points. Perhaps EntreCard will hopefully get rid of points for dropping cards or at least significantly reduce their effect on the price of ads for the card droppers blog, but in the mean time we have to make the most of the situation.

However, now armed with the knowledge that sub par and low quality blogs have higher ad rates because of their excessive card spamming dropping their way to the top of the EntreCard categories you just need to be do more research on which blogs you purchase ads on. Some important factors to consider when deciding which blogs to purchase ads on are as follows:

Location of EntreCard widget:
You absolutely must go to someones blog and look for their EntreCard widget placement before you decide to place an ad on their blog (duh!). But for some reason I still see wait times on ads for people even though their EntreCard widget is in the footer! It won’t matter how cheap an EntreCard ad is if they display the widget in the footer. The higher up the sidebar the widget is, the better of course although I haven’t seen a ton of bloggers with their widget above the fold like me

Check out the RSS count:
If you’re looking to find some blogs to place your ad on quickly this is key figure to look at that will help you decide wether or not it is worth spending your EntreCard credits on someones blog. I can’t understand why people will advertise on blogs that show their RSS count in the low two digit range and have a three digit price for an EntreCard ad. They’re obviously dropping tons of cards daily. If you can’t see an RSS count on their blog start looking for these other factors listed below to help you make your decision.

Level of Reader Interaction:
If no one is responding to the entries on the blog then there are likely very few people actually reading the blog. I rarely advertise on a blog that doesn’t have at least one or two comments on some of the more recent entries.

Quality of content:
Make sure you skim over a post or two on the blog you’re interested in placing an ad on to see if he or she writes quality stuff. It’s another indication as to how many people might be reading the blog but it won’t help you as much as seeing the number of comments that are received on each post in my opinion.

Blogs with a long wait time:
Don’t go by this tip exclusively as you’ll still run into really small bloggers with an inflated EntreCard price that still manage to receive lots of people offering to place ads on their blog. However, I’ve found some great blogs to advertise on that have an 8 day wait and around a 30 credit cost.

Find the diamond in the rough:
What I mean by this is to look for bigger bloggers that have recently added an EntreCard widget to their blog. If you can catch them early enough you can get some cheap advertising before their rates go up. This is by far one of the hardest things to do as most of the more well known bloggers have already added EntreCard if they’re going to even do it at all. It will continue to be harder to do the longer EntreCard is around but it’s always nice to get an ad on a big blog that just added the widget.

Please keep these factors in mind when you determine which blogs to spend your EntreCard credits on. Until EntreCard fixes the ability to game the system and bring low traffic level blogs up into the top levels of their respective categories then you need to do your homework before you buy ads through EntreCard. At the very least please just briefly look at the blog even if you don’t want to analyze the content or check out how many comments are put onto each post. I don’t want you wasting those credits on people that won’t send you traffic.

What do you think of my tips?