How To Get The Best Out Of Entrecard

Networking Via A Reciprocal Drop List

(This is a more extensive explanation of my previous post on link building within Entrecard.)

Build Your Website Traffic By Networking With Other Reciprocal EC Droppers Through A Common Drop List

At Entrecard, members visit each other's sites and click the entrecard widget. This is not mandatory but members do this daily for various reasons. For one, each click made on an entrecard widget earns a credit for the visitor (we call them droppers) as well as for the visited member. These credits can be used to advertise your own widget on other sites. They can also be used to pay for services offered by other members or buy things from Entrecard's own unique marketplace. These credits can even be exchanged for real cash now.

Every click on an Entrecard widget is recorded and fed into your own drops inbox. So you know who visited you  and when. The visits may be fleeting (just a few seconds only just to click the widget), or may be longer if the visitor happens to see something that catches his fancy and decides to stay on a bit longer than usual. Most entrecarders may not be too inclined to hand out favors to just about anyone out there in the blogosphere but they sure are known for returning favors other bloggers bestow on them all of the time. Your visit to their site is considered as one such favor that needs to be returned with a reciprocal visit and a drop. There is in fact an unwritten pact which majority of entrecard members adhere to - the "U Drop, I Follow" policy.

Not every entrecarder is a "U Drop I Follow" fanatic though. Based on my own experiences, at least 80% of those you drop your EC's onto will return the compliment, perhaps not immediately, but definitely no later than a day or two after you made the drop. So, what I did was to make regular drops and monitor those who return the drops religiously. I did this for sometime until I finally came up with a respectable number of tested, regular reciprocal droppers. I then posted the drop list to attract more reciprocal droppers to join. I actually started a network and at the same time created links.

Here is the bonus and the catch!

A blog post containing a list referencing other sites are indexed by search engines (with the sites counted as links). Links are important because Page Ranks are determined by the number of links your blog has to other sites. The more links you have, the higher your page rank becomes.
The catch here is that today, search engines uses a new algorithymn to determine the validity of links. A raw link without a reciprocating link at the other end may be invalidated or ignored by search engine 'crawlers' unless it has a 'no follow' tag attached to it. A 'no follow' tag tells the search engine crawlers not to crawl the other end, and list the link as an outgoing link and not a reciprocal link, and counts it as such. If there is no tag the crawler will attempt to follow the link and if there is no reciprocal link from the other end the link (and perhaps the whole listing) will be invalidated or ignored. On the other hand, if there is a reciprocal link, then it will be validated (with points added for quality) should the site it links to happens to have a high page rank!

Networking with other Entrecarders by joining and posting a drop list such as what I just described above may also have a profound impact on your Technorati Authority. Technorati Authority is a measure of your blog's popularity based on blog reactions. Blog reactions simply means a mention or a link to your site on blog posts published by other sites. However, Technorati robots do not crawl every site for new content as often  and as extensive as Google robot crawlers do. Often, you need to ping Technorati each time you make a post to let them know about it and get their robots to crawl your new content! These were all taken into consideration when I drafted the drop list.

Here are tips on how you can harvest the fullest benefits of an Entrecard Droplist:


1. Make sure your widget is accessible and visible (preferably above the fold)! If you are not yet a member then sign up and set up your widget! It's easy and free!

 As a regular EC dropper, I prefer to visit sites that load their entrecard widgets fast and those where the widgets are immediately visible without scrolling down the page. Most entrecarders dislike having to waste time scrolling down the whole lenght of a blog just searching for the EC widget. Worst, there are members who even hide their widget in a maze of 125x125 ads. Some do this intentionally to get the visitor to stay on the site longer (cheap trick). Others do it on the pretext that the widget ruins their site's design and layout (flimsy). These will only discourage future visits to these sites again by EC droppers.



2. Join the Droplist Network. Copy and paste the list or the widget code on a new post (preferred) or on your side bar if you are already on the list. Once the post is done leave a comment on the similar post at Trader's Hub so that the 'No follow' tag will be taken out in your site's listing. If you are not yet on the list, then post your URL and site name in a comment on the same post.

Making a new post with the embedded/pasted droplist or the widget  is preferred over just embedding the widget on your sidebars because it becomes more of a legitimate blog reaction (which is what it really is) than a 'link farm' and  as such risk the chance of being ignored or invalidated by search engine crawlers.


3. To copy the list, highlight the whole list then press control + C and paste it on your post. To embed the widget on your post, press the 'get the code' button at the bottom of the widget, copy and paste in your post.

The widget in your post is the preferred installation since everytime the list is updated with new members, the widget updates automatically.

4. Use the list in making your drops instead of going to your drop inbox. This way, your site becomes a referring site in google analytics. The more members who use their droplist for their drops from their sites, the more referring sites we all will have, and I guess the better for our popularity rankings and google analytics stats.

5. To use the list in making your drops, right click on each link and choose 'open link in a new tab'. Do this with 10 links at a time. By the time you've right clicked on the tenth link, the first link would have loaded fully so you can now proceed to drop your ec's.

Please note that there are some sites that takes time to load, you can simply skip them and go to other tabs while the site is still loading. Just come back when it has fully loaded.

Using the drop list as described above will make your EC daily drops easy and fun. Using it for link building achieves the same if not better results than holding a blog contest, or giving out awards, or exchanging banner links - and for less effort! And all it takes is a little copy, paste, and post!

Get the Droplist here!