A week ago I decided that I was going to try every piece of technology I came across on the Internet. Not become an expert in it, but at least try it out and report my findings. Today I decided to install Entrecard, a viral marketing “widget”.

First of all let me say there is a LOT of disagreement about Entrecard, it’s value to your website, general misuse, and the concept of “drop and run”. Before I go into these I will explain a bit about what it is.

Entrecard is a system whereby you create a 125×125 pixel advert for your site and “drop” it on other sites that have the Entrecard widget. If the owner of the site likes your advert they will approve it, and usually in turn will visit your site and may “drop” a card on you. This process is repeated over and over until you have approved lots of adverts. These adverts are displayed on your Entrecard widget on your website and a queued up and shown in turn.

The Good

The good thing about Entrecard is people do end up visiting sites they would not have usually visited.

Because the owner has to approve the banner you can assume the advert is at lease vaguely relevant. This is not always the case but more oftem than not it is.

You will get an increase in visitors to your site once you start to use Entrecard, and if you use it according to the guidelines (a lot of dropping) then you should gain a good amount of visitors. The value of these is debatable, and will be discussed further down.

The Bad

Here’s where it starts to get messy. There is a lot of negativity thrown at Entrecard and there are various reasons why.

Firstly, 99% of people who visit your site from an Entrecard link will be Entrecard advertisers. They will load your page, drop their card, and they will be gone within 5 seconds. They will probably not even glance at your posts. The problem with this is twofold. Firstly it takes up needless bandwidth and secondly if you have monetized your site, a visit without any clicks will hit your earnings.

Website success is often judged on visitors per day. Using Entrecard will undoubtedly increase the traffic on your site, but if these people never read the posts and never comment then your statistics are skewed. In my mind the success of a website needs to be judged by genuine visitors per day (not Entrecard) and subscribers to news feeds/newsletters.

The Ugly

More importantly than the above points is the fact that it is seen by many as amateurish and people who otherwise would take your message seriously will see you at attention seeking and unprofessional. For this reason I am unsure if I will keep it on this site.

So, what do you think?

I have only just added the feature to my site, so at present I am unsure how it will work out. From what I have heard you need to put in a lot of effort dropping cards here there and everywhere. I am unwilling to do that.

The reason I am unwilling is I am not going to drop a card on someone if I am not genuinely interested in participating on their site. I think it is rude and defeats the object of networks in general. I know a few people with Entrecards and I will drop on them, but I will also read their posts and comment on them.

For this reason I am unsure if Entrecard will work for me. I will give it a little while to bed in, see how it affects the stats, and will post an update once I have some findings to report.

A question we get asked all the time is “how to get on page 1 of google”? There is no easy answer but what I tell people is that is not necessarily the Holy Grail of web marketing, it is more a by-product of a successful marketing campaign.

Imagine you run a normal “physical” business in Harrogate (i.e. not on the web) and you partnered with a company who designed you flyers, leaflets, adverts or whatever it may be. Imaging also you were listed in the phone book. Would you rely on the phone book to generate your income, probably (hopefully!) not.

When a business starts up it is important to spread the word as far and as wide as possible. New start up’s get their adverts put in as many local places as they can and rely on as many mediums as possible, shop windows, letterboxes, local publications, word of mouth etc. In this case you would target local Harrogate publications, Harrogate Advertisor etc.

Now imagine the following:

• The Yellow Pages: Google
• Local publications: Harrogate Council websites and business directories
• Letterbox advertising: Emails
• Word of mouth: Forums, comments on websites, actual word of mouth!

Each of these are as important as the other, and a business cannot succeed without them.

Now imagine that the Yellow Pages would not list your business unless you prove you have done the other advertising too. Yes, you guessed it, that’s pretty much how Google works!

So, in essence what you need to do is focus less on Google and more on making your business a success. If you do the other aspects of your campaign right your Google ranking will look after itself!

If your computer is anything like mine your bookmarks (favourites) list will be at least as long as your screen, crammed full of interesting (and not so interesting) links you visited way back when. Take a minute to look at a few of them, and re-visit some of these sites.

I did this exercise the other day and found 3 or 4 sites that had so much new content, yet there was no way of me knowing about it without going back to see.

How often would people re-visit your site just to see if there is new content?

There lies the crux of the matter. You can update your content as often as you like, but nobody will see it unless they come back to see.

There are two tools you have to assist you, both very different from each other.

1) The mailing list

This is a difficult one to manage. You get people to add their email address to your list in order to receive updates from you. The problem being how often is it acceptable to “update” the user, vevery post, every week, every month?

People also have a mistrust of this mechanism in terms, worried about ther email address ending up on a spam list.

2) The RSS feed

This is a better option, although requires the user to be a bit more “techno-savvy”.

Basically they use a client like Outlook or Thunderbird to subscribe to your content. They will then receive an update in their mailbox when you update your site.

This works well as it is less intrusive and they can choose to read the update as and when they like. They can even download the last few weeks and read about it on the airplane when they are flying to a meeting.

The only probem with RSS is an awful lot of people still don’t know about it, understand it, or use it. I have half a dozen RSS feeds in my Outlook and would not be without it now.

The good news

The good news is every ThinkSynergy site as of 2008 has RSS built in and is ready to go straight away. If you would like to see how RSS works just click the Orange icon on the right column and subscribe to our RSS feed.